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THE EUROPEAN LIBRARY 

EDITED BY J. E. SPINGARN 



HISTORY 

ITS THEORY AND PRACTICE 



BY 



BENEDETTO CROCE 



AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION 

BY 

DOUGLAS AINSLIE 



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NEW YORK 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 

1921 



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Printed at The Ballantyne Press 

Spottiswoode, Ballantyne &• Co. Ltd. 

Colchester, London (S' Eton, England 






PREFACE 

^:- TO THE FIRST ITALIAN EDITION 

ALMOST all the writings which compose the 
present treatise were printed in the proceedings of 
^Italian academies and in Italian reviews between 
1912 and 1913. Since they formed part of a general 
scheme, their collection in book form presented no 
difficulties. This volume has appeared in German 
under the title Zur Theorie und Geschichte der Historio- 
graphie (Tvihin^Qn^ Mohr, 191 5). 

On publishing in book form in Italian, I made a few 
slight alterations here and there and added three brief 
essays, placed as an appendix to the first part. 

The description of the volume as forming the fourth 
of my Philosophy of the Spirit requires some explanation ; 
for it does not really form a new systematic part of the 
philosophy, and is rather to be looked upon as a deepen- 
ing and amplification of the theory of historiography, 
already outlined in certain chapters of the second part, 
namely the Logic. But the problem of historical com- 
prehension is that toward which pointed all my inves- 
tigations as to the modes of the spirit, their distinction 
and unity, their truly concrete life, which is develop- 
ment and history, and as to historical thought, which 
is the self-consciousness of this life. In a certain sense, 
therefore, this resumption of the treatment of historio- 
graphy on the completion of the wide circle, this 
drawing forth of it from the limits of the first treatment 

5 



6 HISTORIOGRAPHY 

of the subject, was the most natural conclusion that 
could be given to the whole work. The character 
of * conclusion ' both explains and justifies the literary 
form of this last volume, which is more compressed and 
less didactic than that of the previous volumes. 

B. C 

Naples : May 19 16 



TRANSLATOR'S NOTE 

THE author himself explains the precise connexion 
of the present work with the other three volumes 
of the Philosophy of the Spirit^ to which it now 
forms the conclusion. 

I had not contemplated translating this treatise, 
when engaged upon the others, for the reason that it 
was not in existence in its present form, and an external 
parallel to its position as the last, the late comer of the 
four masterpieces, is to be found in the fact of its publi- 
cation by another firm than that which produced the 
preceding volumes. This diversity in unity will, I am 
convinced, by no means act as a bar to the dissemi- 
nation of the original thought contained in its pages, 
none of which will, I trust, escape the diligent reader 
through the close meshes of the translation. 

The volume is similar in format to the Logic^ the 
Philosophy of the Practical^ and the Esthetic. The last 
is now out of print, but will reappear translated by 
me from the definitive fourth Italian edition, greatly 
exceeding in bulk the previous editions. 

The present translation is from the second Italian 
edition, published in 1919. In this the author made 
some slight verbal corrections and a few small additions. 
I have, as always, followed the text with the closest 
respect. 

D. A. 

The Athen^um, London 
November 1920 

7 



CONTENTS 

PART I 

THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

PAGE 

I. History and Chronicle ii 

II. Pseudo-Histories 27 

III. History as History of the Universal. 

Criticism of 'Universal History' 51 

IV. Ideal Genesis and Dissolution of the ' Philo- 

sophy OF History ' 64 

V. The Positivity of History 83 

VI. The Humanity of History 94 

VII. Choice and Periodization 108 

VIII. Distinction (Special Histories) and Division 117 

IX. The 'History of Nature' and History 128 

APPENDICES 

I. Attested Evidence 136 

II. Analogy and Anomaly of Special Histories 141 

III Philosophy and Methodology 151 

PART II 

CONCERNING THE HISTORY OF 
HISTORIOGRAPHY 

I. Preliminary Questions 165 

II. Grjeco-Roman Historiography 181 

III. Medieval Historiography 200 



lo HISTORIOGRAPHY 

PAGE 

IV. The Historiography of the Renaissance 224 

V. The Historiography of the Enlightenment 243 

VI. The Historiography of Romanticism 264 

VII. The Historiography of Positivism 289 

VIII. The New Historiography. Conclusion 309 

Index of Names 315 



PART I 

THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

I 

HISTORY AND CHRONICLE 

I 

CONTEMPORARY history ' is wont to be called 
the history of a passage of time, looked upon as 
a most recent past, whether it be that of the last 
fifty years, a decade, a year, a month, a day, or indeed 
of the last hour or of the last minute. But if we think 
and speak rigorously, the term ' contemporaneous ' can 
be applied only to that history which comes into being 
immediately after the act which is being accomplished, 
as consciousness of that act : it is, for instance, the 
history that I make of myself while I am in the act 
of composing these pages ; it is the thought of my 
composition, linked of necessity to the work of com- 
position. * Contemporary ' would be well employed in 
this case, just because this, like every act of the spirit, 
is outside time (of the first and after) and is formed 
* at the same time ' as the act to which it is linked, 
and from which it is distinguished by means of a dis- 
tinction not chronological but ideal. * Non-contem- 
porary history,' * past history,' would, on the other hand, 
be that which finds itself in the presence of a history 
already formed, and which thus comes into being as 
a criticism of that history, whether it be thousands of 
years or hardly an hour old. 

II 



12 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

But if we look more closely, we perceive that this history 
already formed, which is called or which we would like to 
call * non-contemporary ' or ' past ' history, if it really is 
history, that is to say, if it mean something and is not an 
empty echo, is also contemporary^ and does not in any way 
differ from the other. As in the former case, the con- 
dition of its existence is that the deed of which the history 
is told must vibrate in the soul of the historian, or (to 
employ the expression of professed historians) that the 
documents are before the historian and that they are 
intelligible. That a narrative or a series of narratives 
of the fact is united and mingled with it merely means 
that the fact has proved more rich, not that it has lost 
its quality of being present : what were narratives or 
judgments before are now themselves facts, ' documents * 
to be interpreted and judged. History is never con- 
structed from narratives, but always from documents, or 
from narratives that have been reduced to documents and 
treated as such. Thus if contemporary history springs 
straight from life, so too does that history which is called 
non-contemporary, for it is evident that only an interest 
in the life of the present can move one to investigate 
past fact. Therefore this past fact does not answer to 
a past interest, but to a present interest, in so far as it is 
unified with an interest of the present life. This has 
been said again and again in a hundred ways by his- 
torians in their empirical formulas, and constitutes the 
reason, if not the deeper content, of the success of the 
very trite saying that history is magister vit^e. 

I have recalled these forms of historical technique in 
order to remove the aspect of paradox from the proposi- 
tion that * every true history is contemporary history.' 
But the justice of this proposition is easily confirmed 
and copiously and perspicuously exemplified in the 



HISTORY AND CHRONICLE 13 

reality of hlstoriographical work, provided always that 
we do not fall into the error of taking the works of 
the historians all together, or certain groups of them 
confusedly, and of applying them to an abstract man 
or to ourselves considered abstractly, and of then asking 
what present interest leads to the writing or reading 
of such histories : for instance, what is the present 
interest of the history which recounts the Peloponnesian 
or the Mithradatic War, of the events connected with 
Mexican art, or with Arabic philosophy. For me at 
the present moment they are without interest, and 
therefore for me at this present moment those histories 
are not histories, but at the most simply titles of his- 
torical works. They have been or will be histories in 
those that have thought or will think them, and in 
me too when I have thought or shall think them, re- 
elaborating them according to my spiritual needs. If, 
on the other hand, we limit ourselves to real history, to 
the history that one really thinks in the act of thinking, 
it will be easily seen that this is perfectly identical with 
the most personal and contemporary of histories. When 
the development of the culture of my historical moment 
presents to me (it would be superfluous and perhaps also 
inexact to add to myself as an individual) the problem 
of Greek civilization or of Platonic philosophy or of a 
particular mode of Attic manners, that problem is related 
to my being in the same way as the history of a bit of 
business in which I am engaged, or of a love affair in 
which I am indulging, or of a danger that threatens me. 
I examine it with the same anxiety and am troubled with 
the same sense of unhappiness until I have succeeded 
in solving it. Hellenic life is on that occasion present 
in me ; it solicits, it attracts and torments me, in the 
same way as the appearance of the adversary, of the loved 



14 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

one, or of the beloved son for whom one trembles. 
Thus too it happens or has happened or will happen in 
the case of the Mithradatic War, of Mexican art, and 
of all the other things that I have mentioned above by 
way of example. 

Having laid it down that contemporaneity is not the 
characteristic of a class of histories (as is held with good 
reason in empirical classifications), but an intrinsic 
characteristic of every history, we must conceive the 
relation of history to life as that of unity ; certainly not 
in the sense of abstract identity, but of synthetic unity, 
which implies both the distinction and the unity of the 
terms. Thus to talk of a history of which the documents 
are lacking would appear to be as extravagant as to talk 
of the existence of something as to which it is also 
affirmed that it is without one of the essential conditions 
of existence. A history without relation to the document 
would be an unveriiiable history ; and since the reality 
of history lies in this verifiability, and the narrative in 
which it is given concrete form is historical narrative 
only in so far as it is a critical exposition of the document 
(intuition and reflection, consciousness and auto-con- 
sciousness, etc.), a history of that sort, being without 
meaning and without truth, would be inexistent as 
history. How could a history of painting be composed 
by one who had not seen and enjoyed the works of which 
he proposed to describe the genesis critically .'' And 
how far could anyone understand the works in ques- 
tion who was without the artistic experience assumed 
by the narrator } How could there be a history of 
philosophy without the works or at least fragments of 
the works of the philosophers } How could there be a 
history of a sentiment or of a custom, for example that 
of Christian humility or of knightly chivalry, without the 



HISTORY AND CHRONICLE 15 

capacity for living again, or rather without an actual living 
again of these particular states of the individual soul ? 

On the other hand, once the indissoluble link between 
life and thought in history has been effected, the 
doubts that have been expressed as to the certainty and 
the utility of history disappear altogether in a moment. 
How could that which is a -present producing of our 
spirit ever be uncertain ? How could that knowledge 
be useless which solves a problem that has come forth 
from the bosom of lije ? 



II 

But can the link between document and narrative, 
between life and history, ever be broken ? An affirma- 
tive answer to this has been given when referring 
to those histories of which the documents have been 
lost, or, to put the case in a more general and funda- 
mental manner, those histories whose documents are 
no longer alive in the human spirit. And this has also 
been implied when saying that we all of us in turn 
find ourselves thus placed with respect to this or that 
part of history. The history of Hellenic painting is in 
great part a history without documents for us, as are 
all histories of peoples concerning whom one does not 
know exactly where they lived, the thoughts and feelings 
that they experienced, or the individual appearance of 
the works that they accomplished ; those literatures 
and philosophies, too, as to which we do not know their 
theses, or even when we possess these and are able to 
read them through, yet fail to grasp their intimate 
spirit, either owing to the lack of complementary 
knowledge or because of our obstinate temperamental 
reluctance, or owing to our momentary distraction. 



1 6 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

If, in these cases, when that connexion is broken, 
we can no longer call what remains history (because 
history was nothing but that connexion), and it can 
henceforth only be called history in the sense that we 
call a man the corpse of a man, what remains is not 
for that reason nothing (not even the corpse is really 
nothing). Were it nothing, it would be the same as 
saying that the connexion is indissoluble, because nothing- 
ness is never effectual. And if it be not nothing, if it 
be something, what is narrative without the document ? 

A history of Hellenic painting, according to the 
accounts that have been handed down or have been 
constructed by the learned of our times, when closely 
inspected, resolves itself into a series of names of 
painters (Apollodorus, Polygnotus, Zeuxis, Apelles, etc.), 
surrounded with biographical anecdotes, and into a 
series of subjects for painting (the burning of Troy, 
the contest of the Amazons, the battle of Marathon, 
Achilles, Calumny, etc.), of which certain particulars 
are given in the descriptions that have reached us ; 
or a graduated series, going from praise to blame, of 
these painters and their works, together with names, 
anecdotes, subjects, judgments, arranged more or less 
chronologically. But the names of painters separated 
from the direct knowledge of their works are empty 
names ; the anecdotes are empty, as are the de- 
scriptions of subjects, the judgment of approval or 
of disapproval, and the chronological arrangement, 
because merely arithmetical and lacking real de- 
velopment ; and the reason why we do not realize it 
in thought is that the elements which should constitute 
it are wanting. If those verbal forms possess any 
significance, we owe it to what little we know of antique 
paintings from fragments, from secondary works that 



HISTORY AND CHRONICLE 17 

have come down to us in copies, or in analogous works 
in the other arts, or in poetry. With the exception, 
however, of that Httle, the history of Hellenic art is, 
as such, a tissue of empty words. 

We can, if we like, say that it is * empty of determinate 
content,' because we do not deny that when we pro- 
nounce the name of a painter we think of some painter, 
and indeed of a painter who is an Athenian, and that when 
we utter the word ' battle,' or ' Helen,* we think of a 
battle, indeed of a battle of hoplites, or of a beautiful 
woman, similar to those familiar to us in Hellenic sculp- 
ture. But we can think indifferently of any one of the 
numerous facts that those names recall. For this reason 
their content is indeterminate, and this indetermination 
of content is their emptiness. 

All histories separated from their living documents 
resemble these examples and are empty narratives, and 
since they are empty they are without truth. Is it true 
or not that there existed a painter named Polygnotus and 
that he painted a portrait of Miltiades in the Pcecile ? 
We shall be told that it is true, because one person or 
several people, who knew him and saw the work in 
question, bear witness to its existence. But we must 
reply that it was true for this or that witness, and that 
for us it is neither true nor false, or (which comes to the 
same thing) that it is true only on the evidence of those 
witnesses — that is to say, for an extrinsic reason, whereas 
truth always requires intrinsic reasons. And since that 
proposition is not true (neither true nor false), it is not 
useful either, because where there is nothing the king 
loses his rights, and where the elements of a problem 
are wanting the effective will and the effective need to 
solve it are also wanting, along with the possibiHty of 
its solution. Thus to quote those empty judgments is 



1 8 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

quite useless for our actual lives. Life is a present, 
and that history which has become an empty narration 
is a past ; it is an irrevocable past, if not absolutely so, 
KaB'' avTo^ then certainly for the present moment. 

The empty words remain, and the empty words are 
sounds, or the graphic signs which represent them, and 
they hold together and maintain themselves, not by an 
act of thought that thin)cs them (in which case they 
would soon be filled), but by an act of will, which thinks 
it useful for certain ends of its own to preserve those 
words, however empty or half empty they may be. Mere 
narrative, then, is nothing. but a complex of empty words 
or formulas asserted by an act of the will. 

Now with this definition we have succeeded in giving 
neither more nor less than the true distinction, hitherto 
sought in vain, between history and chronicle. It has 
been sought in vain, because it has generally been 
sought in a difference in the quality of the facts which 
each difference took as its object. Thus, for instance, 
the record of individual facts has been attributed to 
chronicle, to history that of general facts ; to chronicle 
the record of private, to history that of public facts : 
as though the general were not always individual and 
the individual general, and the public were not always 
also private and the private public ! Or else the record 
of important facts (memorable things) has been attributed 
to history, to chronicle that of the unimportant : as 
though the importance of facts were not relative to the 
situation in which we find ourselves, and as though for 
a man annoyed by a mosquito the evolutions of the 
minute insect were not of greater importance than the 
expedition of Xerxes ! Certainly, we are sensible of 
a just sentiment in these fallacious distinctions — namely, 
that of placing the difference between history and 



HISTORY AND CHRONICLE 19 

chronicle in the conception of what interests and of 
what does not interest (the general interests and not the 
particular, the great interests and not the little, etc.). 
A just sentiment is also to be noted in other considera- 
tions that are wont to be adduced, such as the close 
bond between events that there is in history and the 
disconnectedness that appears on the other hand in 
chronicle, the logical order of the first, the purely 
chronological order of the second, the penetration of the 
first into the core of events and the limitation of the 
second to the superficial or external^ and the like. But 
the differential character is here rather metaphorized 
than thought, and when metaphors are not employed as 
simple forms expressive of thought we lose a moment 
after what has just been gained. The truth is that 
chronicle and history are not distinguishable as two 
forms of history, mutually complementary, or as one 
subordinate to the other, but as two different spiritual 
attitudes. History is living chronicle, chronicle is 
dead history ; history is contemporary history, chronicle 
is past history ; history is principally an act of thought, 
chronicle an act of will. Every history becomes 
chronicle when it is no longer thought, but only 
recorded in abstract words, which were once upon a 
time concrete and expressive. The history of philosophy 
even is chronicle, when written or read by those who 
do not understand philosophy : history would even be 
what we are now disposed to read as chronicle, as when, 
for instance, the monk of Monte Cassino notes : looi. 
Beatus Dominicus migravit ad Christum. 1002. Hoc anno 
venerunt Saraceni super Capuam. 1004. Terremotus 
ingens hunc montem exagitavit, etc.; for those facts were 
present to him when he wept over the death of the 
departed Dominic, or was terrified by the natural human 



20 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

scourges that convulsed his native land, seeing the hand 
of God in that succession of events. This does not 
prevent that history from assuming the form of chronicle 
when that same monk of Monte Cassino wrote down 
cold formulas, without representing to himself or thinking 
their content, with the sole intention of not allowing 
those memories to be lost and of handing them down 
to those who should inhabit Monte Cassino after him. 

But the discovery of the real distinction between 
chronicle and history, which is a formal distinction (that 
is to say, a truly real distinction), not only frees us from 
the sterile and fatiguing search after material distinctions 
(that is to say, imaginary distinctions), but it also enables 
us to reject a very common presupposition — namely, 
that of the -priority of chronicle in respect to history. 
Prima annales [chronicles] fuere^ post his tori ^e facta 
sunt, the saying of the old grammarian, Mario Vit- 
torino, has been repeated, generalized, and universalized. 
But precisely the opposite of this is the outcome of the 
inquiry into the character and therefore into the genesis 
of the two operations or attitudes : first comes history, 
then chronicle. First comes the living being, then the 
corpse; and to make history the child of chronicle is 
the same thing as to make the living be born from the 
corpse, which is the residue of life, as chronicle is the 
residue of history. 



Ill 

History, separated from the living document and 
turned into chronicle, is no longer a spiritual act, but 
a thing, a complex of sounds and of other signs. But 
the document also, when separated from life, is nothing 
but a thing like another, a complex of sounds or of 



HISTORY AND CHRONICLE 21 

other signs — for example, the sounds and the letters 
in which a law was once communicated ; the lines cut 
into a block of marble, which manifested a religious 
sentiment by means of the figure of a god ; a heap of 
bones, which were at one time the expression of a man 
or of an animal. 

Do such things as empty narratives and dead docu- 
ments exist ? In a certain sense, no, because external 
things do not exist outside the spirit ; and we already 
know that chronicle, as empty narrative, exists in so far 
as the spirit produces it and holds it firmly with an act 
of will (and it may be opportune to observe once more 
that such an act carries always with it a new act of con- 
sciousness and of thought) : with an act of will, which 
abstracts the sound from the thought, in which dwelt 
the certainty and concreteness of the sound. In the 
same way, these dead documents exist to the extent that 
they are the manifestations of a new life, as the lifeless 
corpse is really itself also a process of vital creation, 
although it appears to be one of decomposition and 
something dead in respect of a particular form of life. 
But in the same way as those empty sounds, which once 
contained the thought of a history, are eventually called 
narratives^ in memory of the thought they contained, 
thus do those manifestations of a new life continue to 
be looked upon as remnants of the life that preceded 
them and is indeed extinguished. 

Now observe how, by means of this string of deduc- 
tions, we have put ourselves into the position of being 
able to account for the partition of historical sources into 
narratives and documents^ as we find it among some of 
our modern methodologists, or, as it is also formulated, 
into traditions and residues or remains (Vberbleibsel, JJber- 
reste). This partition is irrational from the empirical 



22 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

point of view, and may be of use as indicating the in- 
opportunity of the introduction of a speculative thought 
into empiricism. It is so irrational that one immediately 
runs against the difficulty of not being able to distinguish 
what one wished to distinguish. An empty * narrative * 
considered as a thing is tantamount to any other thing 
whatever which is called a * document.' And, on the 
other hand, if we maintain the distinction we incur the 
further difficulty of having to base our historical con- 
struction upon two diffisrent orders of data (one foot 
on the bank and the other in the river) — that is to say, 
we shall have to recur to two parallel instances, one of 
which is perpetually referring us back to the otbfcr. 
And when we seek to determine the relation of the two 
kinds of sources with a view to avoiding the incon- 
venient parallelism, what happens is this ; either the 
relation is stated to depend upon the superiority of the 
one over the other, and the distinction vanishes, because 
the superior form absorbs into itself and annuls the 
inferior form ; or a third term is established, in which 
the two forms are supposed to become united with a 
distinction : but this is another way of declaring them 
to be inexistent in that abstractness. For this reason it 
does not seem to me to be without significance that 
the partition of accounts and documents should not 
have been adopted by the most empirical of the methodo- 
logists. They do not involve themselves in these 
subtleties, but content themselves with grouping the 
historical sources into those that are written and those that 
are represented, or in other similar ways. In Germany, 
however, Droysen availed himself of these distinctions 
between narratives and documents, traditions, etc., in his 
valuable Elements of Historicism (he had strong leanings 
toward philosophy), and they have been employed 



HISTORY AND CHRONICLE 23 

also by other methodologists, who are hybrid empiricists, 
' systematists,' or * pedants,' as they are looked upon in 
our Latin countries. This is due to the copious philo- 
sophical traditions of Germany. The pedantry cer- 
tainly exists, and it is to be found just in that inopportune 
philosophy. But what an excellent thing is that pedantry 
and the contradictions which it entails, how it arouses 
the mind from its empirical slumbers and makes it see 
that in place of supposed things there are in reality 
spiritual acts, where the terms of an irreconcilable 
dualism were supposed to be in conflict, relation and 
unity, on the contrary, prevail ! The partition of 
the sources into narratives and documents, and the 
superiority attributed to documents over narratives, and 
the alleged necessity of narrative as a subordinate but 
ineradicable element, almost form a mythology or 
allegory, which represents in an imaginative manner the 
relation between life and thought, between document 
and criticism in historical thought. 

And document and criticism, life and thought, are the 
true sources of history — that is to say, the two elements 
of historical synthesis ; and as such, they do not stand 
face to face with history, or face to face with the syn- 
thesis, in the same way as fountains are represented as 
being face to face with those who go to them with a pail, 
but they form part of history itself, they are within 
the synthesis, they form a constituent part of it and 
are constituted by it. Hence the idea of a history 
with its sources outside itself is another fancy to be 
dispelled, together with that of history being the opposite 
of chronicle. The two erroneous fancies converge to 
form one. Sources, in the extrinsic sense of the em- 
piricists, like things, are equally with chronicle, which 
.s a class of those things, not anterior but posterior to 



24 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

history. History would indeed be in a fix if it expected 
to be born of what comes after it, to be born of 
external things! Thing, not thought, is born of 
thing : a history derived from things would be a 
thing — that is to say, just the inexistent of which we 
were talking a moment ago. 

But there must be a reason why chronicle as well as 
documents seems to precede history and to be its ex- 
trinsic source. The human spirit preserves the mortal 
remains of history, empty narratives and chronicles, 
and the same spirit collects the traces of past life, 
remains and documents, striving as far as possible to 
preserve them unchanged and to restore them as they 
deteriorate. What is the object of these acts of 
will which go to the preservation of what is empty 
and dead ? Perhaps illusion or foolishness, which 
preserves a little while the worn-out elements of mor- 
tality on the confines of Dis by means of the erection of 
mausoleums and sepulchres ? But sepulchres are not 
foolishness and illusion ; they are, on the contrary, an 
act of morality, by which is affirmed the immortality 
of the work done by individuals. Although dead, they 
live in our memory and will live in the memory of times 
to come. And that collecting of dead documents and 
writing down of empty histories is an act of life which 
serves life. The moment will come when they will serve 
to reproduce past history, enriched and made present to 
our spirit. 

For dead history revives, and past history again be- 
comes present, as the development of life demands them. 
The Romans and the Greeks lay in their sepulchres, 
until awakened at the Renaissance by the new maturity 
of the European spirit. The primitive forms of 
civilization, so gross and so barbaric, lay forgotten, or 



HISTORY AND CHRONICLE 25 

but little regarded, or misunderstood, until that new 
phase of the European spirit, which was known as 
Romanticism or Restoration, ' sympathized ' with them — 
that is to say, recognized them as its own proper present 
interest. Thus great tracts of history which are now 
chronicle for us, many documents now mute, will in 
their turn be traversed with new flashes of life and will 
speak again. 

These revivals have altogether interior motives, and no 
wealth of documents or of narratives will bring them 
about ; indeed, it is they themselves that copiously 
collect and place before themselves the documents and 
narratives, which without them would remain scattered 
and inert. And it will be impossible ever to understand 
anything of the effective process of historical thought 
unless we start from the principle that the spirit itself 
is history, maker of history at every moment of its exist- 
ence, and also the result of all anterior history. Thus 
the spirit bears with it all its history, which coincides 
with itself. To forget one aspect of history and to 
remember another one is nothing but the rhythm of 
the life of the spirit, which operates by determining and 
individualizing itself, and by always rendering inde- 
terminate and disindividualizing previous determinations 
and individualizations, in order to create others more 
copious. The spirit, so to speak, lives again its own 
history without those external things called narratives 
and documents ; but those external things are instru- 
ments that it makes for itself, acts preparatory to that in- 
ternal vital evocation in whose process they are resolved. 
The spirit asserts and jealously preserves ' records of the 
past ' for that purpose. 

What we all of us do at every moment when we 
note dates and other matters concerning our private 



26 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

affairs (chronicles) in our pocket-books, or when we 
place in their little caskets ribbons and dried flowers (I 
beg to be allowed to select these pleasant images, when 
giving instances of the collection of ' documents '), is 
done on a large scale by a certain class of workers called 
-philologists^ as though at the invitation of the whole of 
society. They are specially known as the erudite when 
they collect evidence and narrations, as archaeologists and 
archivists when they collect documents and monuments, 
as the places where such objects are kept (the "silent 
white abodes of the dead ") are called libraries, archives, 
and museums. Can there be any ill-feeling against 
these men of erudition, these archivists and archaeolo- 
gists, who fulfil a necessary and therefore a useful and 
important function ? The fact remains that there is 
a tendency to mock at them and to regard them with 
compassion. It is true enough that they sometimes 
afford a hold for derision with their ingenuous belief 
that they have history under lock and key and are able 
to unlock the ' sources ' at which thirsty humanity may 
quench its desire for knowledge ; but we know that 
history is in all of us and that its sources are in our own 
breasts. For it is in our own breasts alone that is to be 
found that crucible in which the certain is converted 
into the true^ and -philology^ joining with philosophy^ 
produces history. 



II 

PSEUDO-HISTORIES 

I 

HISTORY, chronicle, and philology, of which we 
have seen the origin, are series of mental forms, 
which, although distinct from one another, 
must all of them be looked upon as physiological — that 
is to say, true and rational. But logical sequence now 
leads me from physiology to pathology — to those forms 
that are not forms but deformations, not true but 
erroneous, not rational but irrational. 

The ingenuous belief cherished by the philologists 
that they have history locked up in their libraries, 
museums, and archives (something in the same manner 
as the genius of the Arabian Nights, who was shut up 
in a small vase in the form of compressed smoke) 
does not remain inactive, and gives rise to the idea of a 
history constructed with things, traditions, and docu- 
ments (empty traditions and dead documents), and this 
affords an instance of what may be called philological 
history. I say the idea and not the reality, because it 
is simply impossible to compose a history with external 
things, whatever efforts may be made and whatever 
trouble be taken. Chronicles that have been weeded, 
chopped up into fragments, recombined, rearranged, 
always remain nevertheless chronicles — that is to say, 
empty narratives ; and documents that have been 
restored, reproduced, described, brought into line, 
remain documents — that is to say, silent things. Philo- 
logical history consists of the pouring out of one or 

27 



2 8 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

more books into a new book. This operation bears 
an appropriate name in current language and is known 
as * compilation.' These compilations are frequently 
convenient, because they save the trouble of having 
recourse to several books at the same time ; but they 
do not contain any historical thought. Modern chrono- 
logical philologists regard medieval chroniclers and the 
old Italian historians (from Machiavelli and Guicciardini 
down to Giannone) with a feeling of superiority. These 
writers ' transcribed,' as they called it, their * sources ' 
in the parts of their books that are devoted to narrative 
— that is to say, chronicle. Yet they themselves do not 
and cannot behave otherwise, because when history 
is being composed from * sources ' as external things 
there is never anything else to do but to transcribe the 
sources. Transcription is varied by sometimes sum- 
marizing and sometimes altering the words, and this is 
sometimes a question of good taste and sometimes a 
literary pretence ; it is also a verifying of quotations, 
which is sometimes a proof of loyalty and exactitude, 
sometimes a make-believe and a making oneself believe 
that the feet are planted firmly on the earth, on the 
soil of truth, believed to be narrative and quotation from 
the document. How very many of such philological 
historians there are in our time, especially since the 
so-called ' philological method ' has been exaggerated — 
that is to say, a one-sided value has been attributed to it ! 
These histories have indeed a dignified and scientific 
appearance, but unfortunately fehlt leider ! das geistige 
Band, the spiritual tie is wanting. They really consist 
at bottom of nothing but learned or very learned 
* chronicles,' sometimes of use for purposes of consulta- 
tion, but lacking words that nourish and keep warm the 
minds and souls of men. 



PSEUDO-HISTORIES 29 

Nevertheless, since we have demonstrated that philo- 
logical history really presents chronicles and documents 
and not histories, it might be asked upon what possible 
ground do we accuse it of irrationality and error, seeing 
that we have regarded the formation of chronicles, the 
collection of documents, and all the care that is expended 
upon them as most rational ? But error never lies in 
the fact, but only in the ' claim ' or * idea ' that accom- 
panies the fact. And in this case the idea or claim is 
that which has been defined above as properly belonging 
to philological history — namely, that of composing 
histories with documents and narratives. This claim 
can be said to exercise a rational function also, to the 
extent that it lays down the claim, though without 
satisfying it, that history should go beyond the mere 
chronicle or document. But in so far as it makes the 
claim, without itself fulfilling it, this mode of history 
must be characterized as contradictory and absurd. 

And since the claim is absurd, philological history re- 
mains without truth as being that which, like chronicle, 
has not got truth within it, but derives it from the 
authority to which it appeals. It will be claimed for 
philology that it tests" authorities and selects those most 
worthy of faith. But without dwelling upon the fact that 
chronicle also, and chronicle of the crudest, most ignorant 
and credulous sort, proceeded in a like manner by testing 
and selecting those authorities which seemed to it to be 
the most worthy of faith, it is always a question of faith 
(that is to say, of the thought of others and of thought 
belonging to the past) and not of criticism (that is to 
say, of our own thought in the act), of verisimilitude 
and not of that certainty which is truth. Hence philo- 
logical history can certainly be correct^ but not true 
{rkhtig and not wahr). And as it is without truth. 



30 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

so is it without true historical interest — that is to say, 
it sheds no light upon an order of facts answering to a 
practical and ethical want ; it may embrace any matter 
indifferently, however remote it be from the practical 
and ethical soul of the compiler. Thus, as a pure 
philologist, I enjoy the free choice of indifference, and 
the history of Italy for the last half-century has the 
same value for me as that of the Chinese dynasty of the 
Tsin. I shall turn from one to the other, moved, no 
doubt, by a certain interest, but by an extra-historical 
interest, of the sort formed in the special circle of 
philology. 

This procedure, which is without truth and without 
passion, and is proper to philological history, explains 
the marked contrast so constantly renewed between the 
philological historians and historians properly so called. 
These latter, intent as they are upon the solution of 
vital problems, grow impatient to find themselves offered 
in reply the frigid products of philology, or become 
angry at the persistent assertion that such is history, 
and that it must be treated in such a spirit and with 
such methods. Perhaps the finest explosion of such 
a feeling of anger and annoyance is to be found in the 
Letters on the Study of History (ij^i) of Bolingbroke, 
in which erudition is treated as neither more nor less 
than sumptuous ignorance, and learned disquisitions 
upon ancient or primitive history are admitted at the 
most as resembling those * eccentric preludes ' which 
precede concerts and aid in setting the instruments in 
tune and that can only be mistaken for harmony by 
some one without ear, just in the same way as only he 
who is without historic sense can confuse those exhibi- 
tions of erudition with true history. As an antithesis 
to them he suggests as an ideal a kind of * political maps,' 



PSEUDO-HISTORIES 3 1 

for the use of the intellect and not of the memory, 
indicating the Storie fiorentine of Machiavelli and the 
Trattato del benefici of Fra Paolo as writings that approach 
that ideal. Finally he maintains that for true and living 
history we should not go beyond the beginning of the 
sixteenth century, beyond Charles V and Henry VIII, 
when the political and social history of Europe first 
appeared — a system which still persisted at the beginning 
of the eighteenth century. He then proceeds to paint a 
picture of those two centuries of history, for the use, 
not of the curious and the erudite, but of politicians. 
No one, I think, would wish to deny the just sentiment 
for history which animates these demands, set forth 
in so vivacious a manner. Bolingbroke, however, did 
not rise, nor was it possible for him to rise, to 
the conception of the death and rebirth of every 
history (which is the rigorously speculative con- 
cept of * actual ' and * contemporary ' history), owing 
to the conditions of culture of his time, nor did he 
suspect that primitive barbaric history, which he 
threw into a corner as useless dead leaves, would re- 
appear quite fresh half a century later, as the result of 
the reaction against intellectualism and Jacobinism, and 
that this reaction would have as one of its principal 
promoters a publicist of his own country, Burke, nor 
indeed that it had already reappeared in his own time 
in a corner of Italy, in the mind and soul of Giambattista 
Vico. I shall not adduce further instances of the con- 
flict between effective and philological historians, after 
this conspicuous one of Bolingbroke, because it is 
exceedingly well known, and the strife is resumed 
under our very eyes at every moment. I shall only add 
that it is certainly deplorable (though altogether natural, 
because blows are not measured in a struggle) that the 



32 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

polemic against the * philologists ' should have been 
transferred so as to include also the philologues pure 
and simple. For these latter, the poor learned ones, 
archivists and archaeologists, are harmless, beneficent 
little souls. If they should be destroyed, as is sometimes 
prophesied in the heat of controversy, the fertility of 
the spiritual field would be not only diminished, but 
ruined altogether, and we should be obliged to promote 
to the utmost of our power the reintroduction of those 
coefficients of our culture, very much in the same way 
as is said to have been the case with French agriculture 
after the improvident harrying of the harmless and 
beneficent wasps which went on for several years. 

Whatever of justified or justifiable is to be found in 
the statements as to the uncertainty and uselessness of 
history is also due to the revolt of the pure historic sense 
against philological history. This is to be assumed 
from observing that even the most radical of those 
opponents (Fontenelle, Volney, Delfico, etc.) end by 
admitting or demanding some form of history as not 
useless or uncertain, or not altogether useless and un- 
certain, and from the fact that all their shafts are directed 
against philological history and that founded upon 
authority, of which the only appropriate definition is 
that of Rousseau (in the Emile\ as Part de choisir, 
entre plusieurs mensonges^ celui qui ressemhle mieux a la 
verite. 

In all other respects — that is to say, as regards the 
part due to sensational and naturalistic assumptions — 
historical scepticism contradicts itself here, like every 
form of scepticism, for the natural sciences themselves, 
thus raised to the rank of model, are founded upon 
perceptions, observations, and experiments — that is to 
say, upon facts historically ascertained — and the * sensa- 



PSEUDO-HISTORIES 33 

tions,' upon which the whole truth of knowledge is 
based, are not themselves knowledge, save to the extent 
that they assume the form of affirmations — that is to say, 
in so far as they are history. 

But the truth is that philological history, like every 
other sort of error, does not fall before the enemy's 
attack, but rather solely from internal causes, and it is 
its own professors that destroy it, when they conceive 
of it as without connexion with life, as merely a learned 
exercise (note the many histories that are treatments of 
scholastic themes, undertaken with a view to training 
in the art of research, interpretation, and exposition, and 
the many others that are continuations of this direction 
outside the school and are due to tendency there im- 
parted), and when they themselves evince uncertainty, 
surrounding every statement that they make with doubts. 
The distinction between criticism and hypercriticism has 
been drawn with a view to arresting this spontaneous 
dissolution of historical philology ; thus we find the 
former praised and allowed, while the latter is blamed 
and forbidden. But the distinction is one of the 
customary sort, by means of which lack of intelligence 
disguised as love of moderation contrives to chip off 
the edges from the antitheses that it fails to solve. 
Hypercriticism is the prosecution of criticism; it is 
criticism itself, and to divide criticism into a more and 
a less, and to admit the less and deny the more, is 
extravagant, to say the least of it. No ' authorities * 
are certain while others are uncertain, but all are un- 
certain, varying in uncertainty in an extrinsic and con- 
jectural manner. Who can guarantee himself against 
the false statement made by the usually diligent and 
trustworthy witness in a moment of distraction or 
of passion } A sixteenth-century inscription, still to 



34 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

be read in one of the old byways of Naples, wisely 
prays God (and historical philologists should pray to 
Him fervently every morning) to deliver us now and 
for ever from the lies of honest men. Thus historians 
who push criticism to the point of so-called hyper- 
criticism perform a m^ost instructive philosophical duty 
when they render the whole of such work vain, and 
therefore fit to be called by the title of Sanchez's work 
Quod nihil scitur. I recollect the remark made to me 
when I was occupied with research work in my young 
days by a friend of but slight literary knowledge, to 
whom I had lent a very critical, indeed hypercritical, 
history of ancient Rome. When he had finished 
reading it he returned the book to me, remarking that 
he had acquired the proud conviction of being "the 
most learned of philologists," because the latter arrive 
at the conclusion that they know nothing as the result 
of exhausting toil, while he knew nothing without any 
effort at all, simply as a generous gift of nature.^ 

II 

The consequence of this spontaneous dissolution of 
philological history should be the negation of history 
claimed to have been written with the aid of narratives 
and documents conceived as external things, and the 
consignment of these to their proper lower place as 
mere aids to historical knowledge, as it determines and 
redetermines itself in the development of the spirit. But 
if such consequences are distasteful and the project is 
persevered in of thus writing history in spite of repeated 
failures, the further problem then presents itself as to 
how the cold indifference of philological history and its 

^ See Appendix I. 



PSEUDO-HISTORIES 35 

intrinsic uncertainty can be healed without changing 
those presumptions. The problem, itself fallacious, 
can receive but a fallacious solution, expressed by the 
substitution of the interest of sentiment for the lack of 
interest of thought and of esthetic coherence of repre- 
sentation for the logical coherence here unobtainable. The 
new erroneous form of history thus obtained is poetical 
history. 

Numerous examples of this kind of history are afforded 
by the affectionate biographies of persons much beloved 
and venerated and by the satirical biographies of the 
detested; patriotic histories which vaunt the glory and 
lament the misadventures of the people to which the author 
belongs and with which he sympathizes, and those that 
shed a sinister light upon the enemy people, adversary of 
his own ; universal history, illuminated with the ideals 
of liberalism or humanitarianism, that composed by a 
socialist, depicting the acts, as Marx said, of the "cavalier 
of the sorry countenance," in other words of the capitalist, 
that of the anti-Semite, who shows the Jew to be every- 
where the source of human misfortune and of human 
turpitude and the persecution of the Jew to be the 
acme of human splendour and happiness. Nor is poetical 
history exhausted with this fundamental and general 
description of love and hate (love that is hate and hate 
that is love), for it passes through all the most intricate 
forms, the fine gradations of sentiment. Thus we have 
poetical histories which are amorous, melancholy, 
nostalgic, pessimistic, resigned, confident, cheerful, and 
as many other sorts as one can imagine. Herodotus 
celebrates the romance of the jealousies of the gods, 
Livy the epos of Roman virtue, Tacitus composes 
horrible tragedies, Elizabethan dramas in sculptural 
Latin prose. If we turn to the most modern among the 



36 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

moderns, we find Droysen giving expression to his 
lyrical aspiration toward the strong centralized state 
in his history of Macedonia, that Prussia of Hellas; 
Grote to his aspirations toward democratic institutions, 
as symbolized in Athens ; Mommsen to those directed 
toward empire, as symbolized in Caesar ; Balbo pouring 
forth all his ardours for Latin independence, employing 
for that purpose all the records of Latin battles and 
beginning with nothing less than those between the Itali 
and Etrusci against the Pelasgi ; Thierry celebrating 
the middle class in the history of the Third Estate 
represented by Jacques Bonhomme ; the Goncourts 
writing voluptuous fiction round the figures of Mme 
de Pompadour, of Mme Du Barry, of Marie Antoinette, 
more careful of the material and cut of garments than 
of thoughts ; and, finally, De Barante, in his history of 
the Dukes of Burgundy, having his eye upon knights 
and ladies, arms and love. 

It may seem that the indifference of philological 
history is thus truly conquered and historical material 
dominated by a principle and criterion of values. This 
is the demand persistently addressed to history from 
all sides in our day by methodologists and philosophers. 
But I have avoided the word * value * hitherto, owing 
to its equivocal meaning, apt to deceive many. For 
since history is history of the spirit, and since spirit is 
value, and indeed the only value that is possible to con- 
ceive, that history is clearly always history of values ; 
and since the spirit becomes transparent to itself as 
thought in the consciousness of the historian, the value 
that rules the writing of history is the value of thought. 
But precisely for this reason its principle of determination 
cannot be the value known as the value of ' sentiment,* 
which is life and not thought, and when this life finds 



PSEUDO-HISTORIES 37 

expression and representation, before it has been domi- 
nated by thought, we have poetry, not history. In order 
to turn poetical biography into truly historical biography 
we must repress our loves, our tears, our scorn, and 
seek what function the individual has fulfilled in social 
activity or civilization ; and we must do the same for 
national history as for that of humanity, and for every 
group of facts, small or great, as for every order of events. 
We must supersede — that is to say, transform — values of 
sentiment with values of thought. If we do not find our- 
selves able to rise to this * subjectivity ' of thought, we 
shall produce poetry and not history : the historical 
problem will remain intact, or, rather, it will not yet 
have come into being, but will do so when the requisite 
conditions are present. The interest that stirs us in 
the former case is not that of life which becomes thought, 
but of life which becomes intuition and imagination. 

And since we have entered the domain of poetry, 
while the historical problem remains beyond, erudition 
or philology, from which we seem to have started, 
remains something on this side — that is to say, is alto- 
gether surpassed. In philological history, notwith- 
standing the claims made by it, chronicles and documents 
persist in their crude natural and undigested state. 
But these are profoundly changed in poetical history; 
or, to speak with greater accuracy, they are simply 
dissolved. Let us ignore the case (common enough) 
of the historian who, with a view to obtaining artistic 
effects, intentionally mingles his inventions with the data 
provided by the chronicles and documents, endeavouring 
to make them pass for history — that is to say, he renders 
himself guilty of a lie and is the cause of confusion. 
But the alteration that is continuous and inherent to 
historiography consists of the choice and connexion of 



38 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

the details themselves, selected from the ' sources,* 
rather owing to motives of sentiment than of thought. 
This, closely considered, is really an invention or imagin- 
ing of the facts ; the new connexion becomes concrete 
in a newly imagined fact. And since the data that 
are taken from the ' sources ' do not always lend them- 
selves with docility to the required connexion, it is 
considered permissible to sollkiter doucement les textes (as, 
if I am not mistaken, Renan, one of the historian-poets, 
remarked) and to add imaginary particulars, though in 
a conjectural form, to the actual data. Vossius blamed 
those Grecian historians, and historians of other nations, 
who, when they invent fables, ad effugiendam vanitatis 
notam satis fore -putant si addant solemne suum ^ aiunt^ 
^ jertur^ vel aliquid quod tantundem valeat. But even 
in our own day it would be diverting and instructive 
to catalogue the forms of insinuation employed by 
historians who pass for being most weighty, with a 
view to introducing their own personal imaginings : 
* perhaps,' ' it would seem,' * one would say,' ' it is 
pleasant to think,' * we may infer,' * it is probable,' ' it is 
evident,' and the like ; and to note how they sometimes 
come to omit these warnings and recount things that 
they have themselves imagined as though they had seen 
them, in order to complete their picture, regarding 
which they would be much embarrassed if some one, 
indiscreet as an enfant terrible^ should chance to ask 
them: *' How do you know it } " " Who told you this } " 
Recourse has been had to the methodological theory 
of " imagination necessary for the historian who does 
not wish to become a mere chronicler," to an imagina- 
tion, that is to say, which shall be reconstructive and 
integrating; or, as is also said, to " the necessity of inte- 
grating the historical datum with our personal psychology 



PSEUDO-HISTORIES 39 

or psychological knowledge." This theory, similar to 
that of value in history, also contains an equivocation. 
For doubtless imagination is indispensable to the historian : 
empty criticism, empty narrative, the concept without 
intuition or imagination, are altogether sterile ; and this 
has been said and said again in these pages, when we 
have demanded the vivid experience of the events 
whose history we have undertaken to relate, which also 
means their re-elaboration as intuition and imagination. 
Without this imaginative reconstruction or integration 
it is not possible to write history, or to read it, or to 
understand it. But this sort of imagination, which is 
really quite indispensable to the historian, is the imagina- 
tion that is inseparable from the historical synthesis, the 
imagination in and for thought, the concreteness of 
thought, which is never an abstract concept, but always 
a relation and a judgment, not indetermination but de- 
termination. It is nevertheless to be radically distin- 
guished from the free poetic imagination, dear to those 
historians who see and hear the face and the voice of Jesus 
on the Lake of Tiberias, or follow Heraclitus on his daily 
walks among the hills of Ephesus, or repeat again the 
secret colloquies between Francis of Assisi and the 
sweet Umbrian countryside. 

Here too we shall be asked of what error, then, we 
can accuse poetical history, if it be poetry (a neces- 
sary form of the spirit and one of the dearest to the 
heart of man) and not history. But here also we must 
reply — in manner analogous to our reply in the case of 
philological history — that the error does not lie in what 
is done, but in what is claimed to be done : not in creating 
poetry, but in calling histories that are poetry -poetical 
histories^ which is a contradiction in terms. So far am 
I from entertaining the thought of objecting to poetry 



40 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

woven out of historical data that I wish to affirm that 
a great part of pure poetry, especially in modern times, 
is to be found in books that are called histories. The 
epic, for instance, did not, as is believed, die in the nine- 
teenth century, but it is not to be found in the ' epic 
poems * of Botta, of Bagnoli, of Bellini, or of Bandettini, 
where it is sought by short-sighted classifiers of literature, 
but in narratives of the history of the Risorgimento, where 
are poured forth epic, drama, satire, idyll, elegy, and as 
many other * kinds of poetry ' as may be desired. The 
historiography of the Risorgimento is in great part a 
poetical historiography, rich in legends which still await 
the historian, or have met with him only occasionally 
and by chance, exactly like ancient or medieval epic, 
which, if it were really poetry, was yet believed by its 
hearers, and often perhaps by its composers themselves, 
to be history. And I claim for others and for myself 
the right to imagine history as dictated by my personal 
feeling ; to imagine, for instance, an Italy as fair as a 
beloved woman, as dear as the tenderest of mothers, 
as austere as a venerated ancestress, to seek out her 
doings through the centuries and even to prophesy her 
future, and to create for myself in history idols of hatred 
and of love, to embellish yet more the charming, if I 
will, and to make the unpleasant yet more unpleasant. 
I claim to seek out every memory and every particular, 
the expressions of countenance, the gestures, the gar- 
ments, the dwellings, every kind of insignificant particular 
(insignificant for others or in other respects, but not 
for me at that moment), almost physically to approach 
my friends and my mistresses, of both of which I 
possess a fine circle or harem in history. But it remains 
evident that when I or others have the intention of 
writing history, true history and not poetical history. 



PSEUDO-HISTORIES 41 

we shall clear away myths and idols, friends and mis- 
tresses, devoting our attention solely to the problem of 
history, which is spirit or value (or if less philosophical 
and more colloquial terms be preferred, culture, civiliza- 
tion, progress), and we shall look upon them with the 
two eyes and the single sight of thought. And when 
some one, in that sphere or at that altitude, begins to 
talk to us of the sentiments that but a short while ago 
were tumultuous in our breasts, we shall listen to him 
as to one who talks of things that are henceforth distant 
and dead, in which we no longer participate, because the 
only sentiment that now fills our soul is the sentiment 
of truth, the search for historical truth. 



Ill 

With poetical history — that is to say, with the falling 
back of history into a form ideally anterior, that of 
poetry — the cycle of erroneous forms of history (or of 
erroneous theoretical forms) is complete. But my dis- 
course would not perhaps be complete were I to remain 
silent as to a so-called form of history which had great 
importance in antiquity when it developed its own 
theory. It continues to have some importance in our 
own day, although now inclined to conceal its face, to 
change its garments, and to disguise itself. This is the 
history known in antiquity as oratory or rhetoric. Its 
object was to teach philosophy by example, to incite to 
virtuous conduct, to impart instruction as to the best 
political and military institutions, or simply to delight, 
according to the various intentions of the rhetoricians. 
And even in our own day this type of history is demanded 
and supplied not only in the elementary schools (where 
it seems to be understood that the bitter of wisdom 



42 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

should be imbibed by youth mingled with the sweet of 
fable), but among grown men. It is closely linked up 
with politics, where it is a question of politics, or with 
religion, philosophy, morality, and the like, where they 
are concerned, or with diversions, as in the case of 
anecdotes, of strange events, of scandalous and terri- 
fying histories. But can this, I ask, be considered, I 
do not say history, but an erroneous (theoretical) form 
of history ? The structure of rhetorical history pre- 
supposes a history that already exists^ or at least a poetical 
history, narrated with a practical end. The end would 
be to induce an emotion leading to virtue, to remorse, 
to shame, or to enthusiasm; or perhaps to provide 
repose for the soul, such as is supplied by games; or 
to introduce into the mind a historical, philosophical, 
or scientific truth (movere, delectare^ docere^ or in what- 
ever way it may be decided to classify these ends); 
but it will always be an end — that is to say, a practical 
act, which avails itself of the telling of the history as 
a means or as one of its means. Hence rhetorical 
history (which would be more correctly termed practicis- 
tical history) is composed of two elements, history and 
the practical end, converging into one, which is the 
practical act. For this reason one cannot attack it, but 
only its theory, which is the already mentioned theory, 
so celebrated in antiquity, of history as opus oratorium^ 
as (J3i,\oao(j>La eK TrapaBeLyfxdrcov, as aTroSeLKriKi], as viKiTi 
ryvfivaa-fxa (if warlike), or yvcofMr]<i TraiSev/xa (if political), 
or as evocative of •^Sov)], and the like. This doctrine 
is altogether analogous to the hedonistic and pedagogic 
doctrine relating to poetry which at that time domi- 
nated. It was believed possible to assign an end 
to poetry, whereas an extrinsic end was assigned to 
it, and poetry was thus passed over without being 



PSEUDO-HISTORIES 43 

touched. Practicistical histor}^ (which, however, is not 
history) is exempt from censure as a practical act: each 
one of us is not content with inquiring into history, 
but also acts, and in acting can quite well avail himself 
of the re-evocation of this or that image, with a view 
to stimulating his own work, or (which comes to the same 
thing) the work of others. He can, indeed, read and 
re-read all the books that have from time to time been of 
assistance to him, as Cato the younger had recourse to 
reading the Ph^edo in order to prepare himself for suicide, 
while others have prepared themselves for it by reading 
Werther^ Ortis^ or the poems of Leopardi. From the time 
of the Renaissance to the eighteenth century, many 
others prepared themselves for conspiracies and tyran- 
nicides by reading Plutarch, and so much was this the 
case that one of them, the youthful Boscoli, when con- 
demned to death for a conspiracy against the Medici, 
remarked in his last hour to Delia Robbia (who recounts 
the incident), " Get Brutus out of my head ! " — Brutus, 
not, that is to say, the history of Brutus that he had 
read and thought about, but that by which he had 
been fascinated and urged on to commit the crime. For 
the rest, true and proper history is not that Brutus 
which procreated the modern Bruti with their daggers, 
but Brutus as thought and situated in the world of 
thought. 

One might be induced to assign a special place to 
the history now known as biased, because, on the one 
hand, it seems that it is not a simple history of sentiment 
and poetry, since it has an end to attain, and on the 
other because such end is not imposed upon it from with- 
out, but coincides with the conception of history itself. 
Hence it would seem fitting to look upon it as a form of 
history standing half-way between poetry and practicism, 



44 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

a mixture of the two. But mixed forms and hybrid 
products exist only in the fictitious classifications of 
empiricists, never in the reality of the spirit, and 
biased history, when closely examined, is really either 
poetical history or practicistical history. An exception 
must always he made of the books in which the two 
moments are sometimes to be found side by side, as 
indeed one usually finds true history and chronicle and 
the document and philological and poetical history side 
by side. What gives the illusion of a mingling or of a 
special form of history is the fact that many take their 
point of departure from poetical inspiration (love of 
country, faith in their country, enthusiasm for a great 
man, and so on) and end with practical calculations: 
they begin with poetry and end with the allegations of 
the special pleader, and sometimes, although more rarely, 
they follow an opposite course. This duplication is to 
be observed in the numerous histories of parties that 
have been composed since the world was a world, 
and it is not difficult to discover in what parts of them 
we have manifestations of poetry and in what parts of 
calculation. Good taste and criticism are continually 
effecting this separation for history, as for art and 
poetry in general. 

It is true that good taste loves and accepts poetry and 
discriminates between the practical intentions of the poet 
and those of the historian-poet ; but those intentions 
are received and admitted by the moral conscience, 
provided always that they are good intentions and con- 
sequently good actions ; and although people are dis- 
posed to speak ill of advocates in general, it is certain 
that the honest advocate and the prudent orator cannot 
be dispensed with in social life. Nor has so-called 
practicistical history ever been dispensed with, either 



PSEUDO-HISTORIES 45 

according to the Graeco-Roman practice, which was that 
of proposing portraits of statesmen, of captains, and of 
heroic women as models for the soul, or according to 
that of the Middle Ages, which was to repeat the lives 
of saints and hermits of the desert, or of knights strong 
of arm and of unshakable faith, or in our own modern 
world, which recommends as edifying and stimulating 
reading the lives and * legends * of inventors, of business 
men, of explorers, and of millionaires. Educative 
histories, composed with the view of promoting definite 
practical or moral dispositions, really exist, and every 
Italian knows how great were the effects of Colletta's and 
Balbo's histories and the like during the period of the 
Risorgimento, and everyone knows books that have 
* inspired * him or inculcated in him the love of his own 
country, of his town and steeple. 

This moral efficacy, which belongs to morality and 
not to history, has had so strong a hold upon the mind 
that the prejudice still survives of assigning a moral 
function to history (as also to poetry) in the field of 
teaching. This prejudice is still to be found inspiring 
even Labriola's pedagogic essay on The Teaching of 
History, But if we mean by the word * history ' both 
history that is thought as well as that which, on the 
contrary, is poetry, philology, or moral will, it is clear 
that * history * will enter the educational process not 
under one form alone, but under all these forms. But 
as history proper it will only enter it under one of them, 
which is not that of moral education, exclusively or 
abstractly considered, but of the education or develop- 
ment of thought. 



46 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

IV 

Much is said, now even more than formerly, of the 
necessity of a * reform of history,' but to me there does 
not seem to be anything to reform. Nothing to reform^ 
in the sense attributed to such a demand — namely, tha t 
of moulding a new form of history or of creating for the 
first time true history. History is, has been, and always 
will be the same, what we have called living history, 
history that is (ideally) contemporary ; and chronicle, 
philological history, poetical history, and (let us call it 
history nevertheless) practicistical history are, have been, 
and always will be the same. Those who undertake 
the task of creating a new history always succeed in 
setting up philological history against poetical history, or 
poetical history against philological history, or contem- 
porary history against both of them, and so on. Unless, 
indeed, as is the case with Buckle and the many tiresome 
sociologists and positivists of the last ten years, they 
lament with great pomposity and no less lack of intelli- 
gence as to what history is that it lacks the capacity of 
observation and of experiment (that is to say, the natural- 
istic abstraction of observation and experiment), boast- 
ing that they * reduce history to natural science ' — that 
is to say, by the employment of a circle, as vicious as it 
is grotesque, to a mental form which is its pale derivative. 

In another sense, everything is certainly to be reformed 
in history, and history is at every moment labouring to 
render herself perfect — that is to say, is enriching herself 
and probing more deeply into herself. There is no 
history that completely satisfies us, because any con- 
struction of ours generates new facts and new problems 
and solicits new solutions. Thus the history of Rome, 
of Greece, and of Christianity, of the Reformation, of 



PSEUDO-HISTORIES 47 

the French Revolution, of philosophy, of literature, 
and of any other subject is always being told afresh and 
always differently. But history reforms herself, remain- 
ing herself always, and the strength of her development 
lies precisely in thus enduring. 

The demand for radical or abstract reform also cannot 
be given that other meaning of a reform of the ' idea 
of history,' of the discovery that is to be made or is 
finally made of the true concept of history. At all 
periods the distinction has to some extent been made 
between histories that are histories and those others 
that are works of imagination or chronicles. This 
could be demonstrated from the observations met with 
at all times among historians and methodologists, and 
from the confessions that even the most confused of 
them involuntarily let fall. It is also to be inferred 
with certainty from the nature itself of the human spirit, 
although the words in which those distinctions are ex- 
pressed have not been written or are not preserved. 
And such a concept and distinction are renewed at 
every moment by history itself, which becomes ever 
more copious, more profound. This is to be looked 
upon as certain, and is for that matter made evident by 
the history of historiography, which has certainly 
accomplished some progress since the days of Diogenes 
of Halicarnassus and of Cicero to those of Hegel and 
of Humboldt. Other problems have been formed in 
our own day, some of which I attempt to solve in this 
book. I am well aware that it affords solutions only 
to some among the many, and especially that it does 
not solve (simply because it cannot) those that are not 
yet formed, but which will inevitably be formed in the 
future. 

In any case it will be thought that the clearness 



48 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

acquired by the historical consciousness as to the nature 
of its own work will at least avail to destroy the erroneous 
forms of history, that since we have shown that 
philological history or chronicle is not history, and that 
poetical history is poetry and not history, the ' facts * 
that correspond to those beliefs must disappear, or 
become ever more limited in extension, to the point 
of disappearing altogether in a near or distant future, 
as catapults have disappeared before guns and as we see 
carriages disappearing before automobiles. 

And this would be truly possible were these erroneous 
forms to become concrete in * facts,' were they not, as 
I have said above, mere ' claims.' If error and evil were 
a fact, humanity would have long ago abolished it- — 
that is to say, superseded it, in the same way as it has 
superseded slavery and serfdom and the method of 
simple barter and so many other things that were facts, 
that is to say, its own transitory forms. But error (and 
evil, which is one with it) is not a fact ; it does not 
possess empirical existence ; it is nothing but the negative 
or dialectical moment of the spirit, necessary for the 
concreteness of the positive moment, for the reality of 
the spirit. For this reason it is eternal and indestructible, 
and to destroy it by abstraction (since it cannot be done 
by thought) is equivalent to imagining the death of the 
spirit, as confirmed in the saying that abstraction is 
death. 

And without occupying further space with the ex- 
position of a doctrine that would entail too wide a 
digression,^ I shall observe that a glance at the history 
of history proves the salutary nature of error, which is not 
a Caliban, but rather an Ariel, who breathes everywhere, 
calling forth and exciting, but can never be grasped as a 

^ See Logic as Science of Pure Concept. — D. A. 



PSEUDO-HISTORIES 49 

solid thing. And with a view to seeking examples only 
in those general forms that have been hitherto examined, 
polemical and tendencious historiography is certainly 
to be termed error. This prevailed during the period 
of the enlightenment, and reduced history to a pleading 
against priests and tyrants. But who would have 
wished simply to return from this to the learned and 
apathetic history of the Benedictines and of the other 
authors of folios ? The polemic and its direction 
expressed the need for living history, though not in an 
altogether satisfactory form, and this need was followed 
by the creation of a new historiography during the 
period of romanticism. The type of merely philological 
history, promulgated in Germany after 1820, and after- 
ward disseminated throughout Europe, was also cer- 
tainly error ; but it was likewise an instrument of 
liberation from the more or less fantastic and arbitrary 
histories improvised by the philosophers. But who 
would wish to turn back from them to the ' philosophies 
of history ' ? The type of history, sometimes tenden- 
cious, but more often poetical, which followed in the 
wake of the national Italian movement, was also error 
— that is to say, it led to the loss of historical calm. 
But that poetical consciousness which surpassed itself 
when laying claim to historical truth was bound sooner 
or later to generate (as had been the case on a larger 
scale in the eighteenth century) a history linked with 
the interests of life without becoming servile and 
allowing itself to be led away by the phantoms of love 
and hate suggested by them. Further examples could 
be adduced, but the example of examples is that which 
happens within each of us when we are dealing with 
historical material. We see our sympathies and anti- 
pathies arise in turn as we proceed (our poetical history), 



50 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

our intentions as practical men (our rhetorical his- 
tory), our chroniclistical memories (our philological 
history) ; we mentally supersede these forms in turn, 
and in doing so find ourselves in possession of a new 
and more profound historical truth. Thus does history 
affirm itself, distinguishing itself from non-histories and 
conquering the dialectical moments which arise from 
these. It was for this reason that I said that there is 
never anything of anything to reform in the abstract^ but 
everything of everything in the concrete. 



Ill 

HISTORY AS HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSAL 
CRITICISM OF * UNIVERSAL HISTORY ' 

I 

RETURNING from this dialectical round to the 
concept of history as * contemporary history,' 
a new doubt assails and torments us. For if 
the proof given has freed that concept from one of 
the most insistent forms of historical scepticism (the 
scepticism that arises from the lack of reliability of 
'testimony'), it does not seem that it has been freed or 
ever can be freed from that other form of scepticism, 
more properly termed * agnosticism,' which does not 
absolutely deny the truth of history, but denies to it 
complete truth. But in ultimate analysis this is to 
deny to it real knowledge, because unsound knowledge, 
half knowledge, also reduces the vigour of the part 
that it asserts to be known. It is, however, commonly 
asserted that only a part of history, a very small part, 
is known to us : a faint glimmer which renders yet 
more sensible the vast gloom that surrounds our know- 
ledge on all sides. 

In truth, what do we know of the origins of Rome 
or of the Greek states, and of the people who preceded 
the Greek and Roman civilizations in those countries, 
notwithstanding all the researches of the learned } And 
if a fragment of the life of these people does remain to 
us, how uncertain is its interpretation! If some tradition 
has been handed down to us, how poor, confused, and 
contradictory it is ! And we know still less of the people 

51 



52 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

who preceded those people, of the immigrations from 
Asia and Africa into Europe or inversely, and of 
relations with other countries beyond the ocean, even 
with the Atlantis of the myths. And the monogenesis 
or polygenesis of the human race is a desperate head- 
splitter, open to all conjectures. The appearance upon 
the earth of the genus homo is open to vain conjec- 
tures, as is his affinity or relationship to the animals. 
The history of the earth, of the solar system, of the 
whole cosmos, is lost in the obscurity of its origin. But 
obscurity does not dwell alone among the ' origins * ; 
the whole of history, even that of modern Europe 
which is nearest to us, is obscure. Who can really 
say what motives determined a Danton or a Robespierre, 
a Napoleon or an Alexander of Russia } And how 
numerous are the obscurities and the lacunae that relate 
to the acts themselves — that is to say, to their external- 
ization ! Mountains of books have been written upon 
the days of September, upon the eighteenth of Brumaire, 
upon the burning of Moscow ; but who can tell how 
these things really happened ? Even those who were 
direct witnesses are not able to say, for they have 
handed down to us diverse and conflicting narratives. 
But let us leave great history. Will it not at least be 
possible for us to know a little history completely, we 
will not say that of our country, of our town, or of our 
family, but the least little history of any one of ourselves : 
what he really wanted when (many years ago or yesterday) 
he abandoned himself to this or that motive of passion, 
and uttered this or that word ; how he reached this or 
that particular conclusion or decided upon some par- 
ticular course of action ; whether the motives that urged 
him in a particular direction were lofty or base, moral or 
egoistic, inspired by duty or by vanity, pure or impure } 



UNIVERSAL HISTORY 53 

It is enough to make one lose one's head, as those 
scrupulous people are aware, who the more they attempt 
to perfect their examination of conscience the more they 
are confused. No other counsel can be offered to them 
than that of examining themselves certainly, but not 
overmuch, of looking rather ahead than behind, or only 
looking behind to the extent that it is necessary to look. 
We certainly know our own history and that of the 
world that surrounds us, but how little and how meagrely 
in comparison with our infinite desire for knowledge 1 

The best way of ending this vexation of spirit is 
that which I have followed, that of pushing it to its 
extreme limit, and then of imagining for a moment 
that all the interrogations mentioned, together with the 
infinite others that could be mentioned, have been satis- 
fied ; satisfied as interrogations that continued to the 
infinite can be satisfied — that is to say, by affording an 
immediate answer to them, one after the other, and by 
causing the spirit to enter the path of a vertiginous 
process of satisfactions, always obtained to the infinite. 
Now, were all those interrogations satisfactorily answered, 
were we in possession of all the answers to them, what 
should we do ? The road of progress to the infinite 
is as wide as that to hell, and if it does not lead to hell 
it certainly leads to the madhouse. And that infinite, 
which grows bigger the moment we first touch it, 
does not avail us ; indeed it fills us with fear. Only the 
poor finite assists us, the determined, the concrete 
which is grasped by thought and which lends itself as 
base for our existence and as point of departure for 
our action. Thus even were all the particular infinities 
of infinite history offered for the gratification of our 
desire, there would be nothing else left for us to do 
but to clear our minds of them, to forget them, and to 



54 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

concentrate upon that particular point alone which corre- 
sponds to a problem and constitutes living, active history, 
contemporary history. 

And this is what the spirit in its development accom- 
plishes, because there is no fact that is not known at 
the moment of its being done, by means of the con- 
sciousness that germinates perpetually upon action; 
and there is no fact that is not forgotten sooner or later, 
but may be recalled, as we remarked when speaking of 
dead history revived at the touch of life, of the past 
that by means of the contemporaneous becomes again 
contemporaneous. Tolstoi got this thought fixed in his 
mind: not only is no one, not even a Napoleon, able 
to predetermine with exactitude the happenings of a 
battle, but no one can know how it really did happen, 
because on the very evening of its ending an artificial, 
legendary history appears, which only a credulous 
spirit could mistake for real history ; yet it is upon this 
that professional historians work, integrating or tem- 
pering imagination with imagination. But the battle 
is known as it gradually develops, and then as the 
turmoil that it causes is dissipated, so too is dissipated 
the turmoil of that consciousness, and the only thing of 
importance is the actuality of the new situation and the 
new disposition of soul that has been produced, expressed 
in poetical legends or availing itself of artificial fictions. 
And each one of us at every moment knows and forgets 
the majority of his thoughts and acts (what a misfortune 
it would be if he did not do so, for his life would be 
a tiresome computation of his smallest movements !) ; 
but he does not forget, and preserves for a greater or 
less time, those thoughts and sentiments which represent 
memorable crises and problems relating to his future. 
Sometimes we assist with astonishment at the awakening 



UNIVERSAL HISTORY 55 

in us of sentiments and thoughts that we had believed 
to be irrevocable. Thus it must be said that we know 
at every moment all the history that we need to know; 
and since what remains over does not matter to us, 
we do not possess the means of knowing it, or we shall 
possess it when the need arises. That ' remaining * 
history is the eternal phantom of the ' thing in itself,' 
which is neither ' thing ' nor * in itself,' but only the 
imaginative projection of the infinity of our action and 
of our knowledge. 

The imaginative projection of the thing in itself, with 
the agnosticism that is its result, is caused in philosophy 
by the natural sciences, which posit a reality made 
extrinsic and material and therefore unintelligible. 
Chroniclism also occasions historical agnosticism in an 
analogous manner at the naturalistic moment of history, 
for it posits a dead and unintelligible history. Allowing 
itself to be seduced by this allurement it strays from 
the path of concrete truth, while the soul feels itself 
suddenly filled with infinite questions, most vain and 
desperate. In like manner, he who strays from or 
has not yet entered the fruitful path of a diligent life, 
feels his soul full to overflowing of infinite desires, of 
actions that cannot be realized, of pleasures out of 
reach, and consequently suffers the pains of a Tantalus. 
But the wisdom of life warns us not to lose ourselves in 
absurd desires, as the wisdom of thought warns us not 
to lose ourselves in problems that are vain. 



II 

But if we cannot know anything but the finite and the 
particular, always indeed only this particular and this 
finite, must we then renounce (a dolorous renunciation !) 



$6 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

knowledge of universal history? Without doubt, but with 
the double corollary that we are renouncing what we 
have never possessed, because we could not possess it, 
and that in consequence such renunciation is not at 
all painful. 

' Universal history,' too, is not a concrete act or 
fact, but a ' claim,' and a claim due to chroniclism and 
to its * thing in itself,' and to the strange proposal of 
closing the infinite progression, which had been im- 
properly opened, by means of progress to the infinite. 
Universal history really tries to form a picture of all the 
things that have happened to the human race, from its 
origins upon the earth to the present moment. Indeed, 
it claims to do this from the origin of things, or the 
creation, to the end of the world, since it would not 
otherwise be truly universal. Hence its tendency to 
fill the abysses of prehistory and of the origins with 
theological or naturalistic fictions and to trace somehow 
the future, either with revelations and prophecies, . as 
in Christian universal history (which went as far as 
Antichrist and the Last Judgment), or with previsions, 
as in the universal histories of positivism, democratism, 
and socialism. 

Such was its claim, but the result turns out to be 
different from the intention, and it gets what it can 
— that is to say, a chronicle that is always more or 
less of a mixture, or a poetical history expressing some 
aspiration of the heart of man, or a true and proper 
history, which is not universal, but -particular^ although 
it embraces the lives of many peoples and of many 
times. Most frequently these different elements are 
to be discerned side by side in the same literary com- 
position. Omitting chronicles more or less wide in 
scope (though always narrow), poetical histories, and the 



UNIVERSAL HISTORY 57 

various contaminations of several different forms, we 
immediately perceive, not as a result of logical deduction 
alone, but with a simple glance at any one of the * uni- 
versal histories,' that * universal histories,' in so far as 
they are histories, or in that part of them in which they 
are histories, resolve themselves into nothing else but 
* particular histories ' — that is to say, they are due to a 
particular interest centred in a particular problem, and 
comprehend only those facts that form part of that in- 
terest and afford an answer to that particular problem. 
For antiquity the example of the work of Polybius 
should suffice for all, since it was he who most vigor- 
ously insisted upon the need for a * universal history ' 

{KadoXiKT] la-ropia, rj tcov KadoXov TrpajfiaTcov crvvra^i<i). 

For the Christian period we may cite the Civitas Dei 
of Augustine, and for modern times the Philosophy of 
History of Hegel (he also called it universal history, 
or philosophische Weltgeschichte), But we observe here 
that the universal history which Polybius desired and 
created was that more vast, more complex, more poli- 
tical, and graver history which Roman hegemony and 
the formation of the Roman world required, and there- 
fore that it embraced only those peoples which came 
into relation and conflict with Rome, and limited itself 
almost altogether to the history of political institutions 
and of military dispositions, according to the spiritual 
tendencies of the author. Augustine, in his turn, 
attempted to render intelligible the penetration of 
Paganism by Christianity, and with this object in view 
he made use of the idea of two enemy cities, the terres- 
trial and the celestial, of which the first was sometimes 
the adversary of and sometimes preparatory to the second. 
Finally, Hegel treated the same problem in his universal 
history as in his particular history of philosophy — that is 



58 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

to say, the manner in which the spirit of a philosophy 
of servitude to nature, or to the transcendental God, 
has elevated itself to the consciousness of liberty. He 
cut out prehistory from the philosophy of history, as 
he had cut it out from the history of philosophy, and 
considered Oriental history very summarily, since it did 
not offer much of interest to the prosecution of his 
design. 

Naturalistic or cosmological romances will always be 
composed by those who feel inspired to write them, 
and they will always find eager and appreciative readers, 
especially among the lazy, who are pleased to possess 
the * secret of the world ' in a few pages. And more 
or less vast compilations will always be made of the 
histories of the East and the West, of the Americas 
and Africa and Oceania. The strength of a single in- 
dividual does not suffice for these, even as regards their 
compilation, so we now find groups of learned men 
or compilers associated in that object (as though to give 
ocular evidence of the absence of all intimate connexion). 
We have even seen recently certain attempts at universal 
histories arranged on geographical principles, like so 
many histories set side by side — European, Asiatic, 
African, and so on — which insensibly assume the form 
of a historical dictionary. And this or that particular 
history can always usefully take the name of a ' universal 
history,' in the old sense of Polybius — that is to say, 
as opposed to books that are less actual, less serious, 
and less satisfactory, the books of those ' writers of par- 
ticular things (pi Ta<; eVl fxepovi ypdcfiovre'; Trpd^ety 
who are led to make little things great (ra jjuKpco 
fieydXa iroielv) and to indulge in lengthy anecdotes 
unworthy of being recorded (jrepl rwv /xr/Sk fivniJb'n'i 
d^LQ)v), and that owing to the lack of a criterion {St 



UNIVERSAL HISTORY 59 

aKpta-tav). In this sense, those times and peoples 
whose politico-social development had produced, as it 
were, a narrowing of the historical circle would be well 
advised to break away from minute details and to en- 
visage * universal history ' — that is to say, a vaster history, 
which lies beyond particular histories. This applies in 
particular to our Italy, which, since it had a universalistic 
function at the time of the Renaissance, had universal 
vision, and told the history of all the peoples in its own way, 
and then limited itself to local history, then again elevated 
itself to national history, and should now, even more 
than in the past, extend itself over the vast fields of the 
history of all times past and present. But the word 
* universal,' which has value for the ends above men- 
tioned, will never designate the possession of a ' uni- 
versal history,' in the sense that we have refused to it. 
Such a history disappears in the world of illusions, 
together with similar Utopias, such, for instance, as the 
art that should serve as model for all times, or universal 
justice valid for all time. 



Ill 

But in the same way that by the dissipation of the 
illusion of universal art and of universal justice the 
intrinsically universal character of particular art and of 
particular justice is not cancelled (of the Iliad or of the 
constitution of the Roman family), to negate universal 
history does not mean to negate the universal in history. 
Here, too, must be repeated what was said of the vain 
search for God throughout the infinite series of the 
finite and found at every point of it : Und du hist ganz 
vor mir ! That particular and that finite is determined, 
in its particularity and finitude, by thought, and therefore 



6o THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

known together with the universal, the universal in that 
particular form. The merely finite and particular does 
not exist save as an abstraction. There is no abstract 
finite in poetry and in art itself, which is the reign of 
the individual ; but there is the ingenuous finite, which 
is the undistinguished unity of finite and infinite, which 
will be distinguished in the sphere of thought and will 
in that way attain to a more lofty form of unity. And 
history is thought, and, as such, thought of the universal, 
of the universal in its concreteness, and therefore always 
determined in a particular manner. There is no fact, 
however small it be, that can be otherwise conceived 
(realized and qualified) than as universal. In its most 
simple form — that is to say, in its essential form — history 
expresses itself with judgments, inseparable syntheses of 
individual and universal. And the individual is called 
the subject of the judgment, the universal the -predicate^ 
by old terminological tradition, which it will perhaps be 
convenient to preserve. But for him who dominates 
words with thought, the true subject of history is just 
the -predicate^ and the true predicate the subject — that is 
to say, the universal is determined in the judgment by 
individualizing it. If this argument seems too abstruse 
and amounts to a philosophical subtlety, it may be rendered 
obvious and altogether different from a private possession 
of those known as philosophers by means of the simple 
observation that everyone who reflects, upon being asked 
what is the subject of the history of poetry, will certainly 
not reply Dante or Shakespeare, or Italian or English 
poetry, or the series of poems that are known to us, 
but poetry — that is to say, a universal ; and again, when 
asked what is the subject of social and political history, 
the answer will not be Greece or Rome, France or 
Germany, or even all these and others such combined, 



UNIVERSAL HISTORY 6i 

but culture^ civilization^ progress^ liberty^ or any other 
similar word — that is to say, a universal. 

And here we can remove a great stumbling-block 
to the recognition of the identity of philosophy with 
history, I have attempted to renovate, modify, and 
establish this doctrine with many analyses and with 
many arguments in another volume of my works.^ It 
is, however, frequently very difficult, being rather an 
object of irresistible argument than of complete per- 
suasion and adhesion. Seeking for the various causes 
of this difficulty, I have come upon one which seems 
to me to be the principal and fundamental. This is 
precisely the conception of history not as living contem- 
porary history, but as history that is dead and belongs 
to the past, as chronicle (or philological history, which, 
as we know, can be reduced to chronicle). It is un- 
deniable that when history is taken as chronicle its 
identity with philosophy cannot be made clear to the 
mind, because it does not exist. But when chronicle 
has been reduced to its proper practical and mnemonical 
function, and history has been raised to the knowledge 
of the eternal present^ it reveals itself as all one with 
philosophy, which for its part is never anything but the 
thought of the eternal present. This, be it well under- 
stood, provided always that the dualism of ideas and facts 
has been superseded, of verites de raison and verites de 
fait^ the concept of philosophy as contemplation of 
verites de raison^ and that of history as the amassing of 
brute facts, of coarse verites de fait. We have recently 
found this tenacious dualism in the act of renewing 
itself, disguised beneath the axiom that le propre de 
Vhistoire est de s avoir ^ le propre de la philosophie est de 
comprendre. This amounts to the absurd distinction of 

^ In the Logic, especially in Part II, Chapter IV. 



62 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

knowing without understanding and of understanding 
without knowing, which would thus be the doubly dis- 
heartening theoretical fate of man. But such a dualism 
and the conception of the world which accompanies it, 
far from being true philosophy, are the perpetual source 
whence springs that imperfect attempt at philosophizing 
which is called religion when one is within its magic 
circle, mythology when one has left it. Will it be useful 
to attack transcendency, and to claim the character of 
immanence for reality and for philosophy ? It will cer- 
tainly be of use ; but I do not feel the necessity of 
doing so, at any rate here and now. 

And since history, properly understood, abolishes the 
idea of a universal history^ so philosophy, immanent and 
identical with history, abolishes the idea of a universa 
philosophy — that is to say, of the closed system. The 
two negations correspond and are indeed fundamentally 
one (because closed systems, like universal histories, are 
cosmological romances), and both receive empirical con- 
firmation from the tendency of the best spirits of our day 
to refrain from ' universal histories * and from 'definitive 
systems,' leaving both to compilers, to believers, and to 
the credulous of every sort. This tendency was implicit 
in the last great philosophy, that of Hegel, but it was 
opposed in its own self by old survivals and altogether 
betrayed in execution, so that this philosophy also con- 
verts itself into a cosmological romance. Thus it may 
be said that what at the beginning of the nineteenth 
century was merely a simple presentiment becomes 
changed into firm consciousness at the beginning of the 
twentieth. This defies the fears of the timid lest the 
knowledge of the universal should be thus compromised, 
and indeed maintains that only in this way can such 
knowledge be truly and perpetually acquired, because 



UNIVERSAL HISTORY 63 

dynamically obtained. Thus history becoming actual 
history and philosophy becoming historical philosophy have 
freed themselves, the one from the anxiety of not being 
able to know that which is not known, only because it 
was or will be known, and the other from the despair 
of never being able to attain to definite truth — that -is 
to say, both are freed from the phantom of the * thing 
in itself.' 



IV 

IDEAL GENESIS AND DISSOLUTION OF THE 
* PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY ' 

I 

THE conception of the so-called ' philosophy of 
history ' is perpetually opposed to and resisted 
by the deterministic conception of history. Not 
only is this clearly to be seen from inspection, but it 
is also quite evident logically, because the * philosophy 
of history ' represents the transcendental conception of 
the real, determinism the immanent. 

But on examining the facts it is not less certain that 
historical determinism perpetually generates the ' philo- 
sophy of history ' ; nor is this fact less evidently logical 
than the preceding, because determinism is naturalism, 
and therefore immanent, certainly, but insufficiently and 
falsely immanent. Hence it should rather be said that 
it wishes to be, but is not, immanent, and whatever its 
efforts may be in the contrary direction, it becomes 
converted into transcendency. All this does not present 
any difficulty to one who has clearly in mind the con- 
ceptions of the transcendent and of the immanent, of 
the philosophy of history as transcendency and of the 
deterministic or naturalistic conception of history as a 
false immanence. But it will be of use to see in more 
detail how this process of agreements and oppositions 
is developed and solved with reference to the problem 
of history. 

" First collect the facts, then connect them causally " ; 
this is the wav that the work of the historian is 
64 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 65 

represented in the deterministic conception, ^pres la 
collection des faits^ la recherche des causes^ to repeat the 
very common formula in the very words of one of the 
most eloquent and picturesque theorists of that school, 
Taine. Facts are brute, dense, real indeed, but not 
illumined with the light of science, not intellectualized. 
This intelligible character must be conferred upon 
them by means of the search for causes. But it is very 
well known what happens when one fact is linked to 
another as its cause, forming a chain of causes and 
effects: we thus inaugurate an infinite regression, and 
we never succeed in finding the cause or causes to which 
we can finally attach the chain that we have been so 
industriously putting together. 

Some, maybe many, of the theorists of history get 
out of the difficulty in a truly simple manner: they break 
or let fall at a certain point their chain, which is already 
broken at another point at the other end (the effect 
which they have undertaken to consider). They operate 
with their fragment of chain as though it were something 
perfect and closed in itself, as though a straight line 
divided at two points should include space and be a 
figure. Hence, too, the doctrine that we find among the 
methodologists of history: that it is only necessary for 
history to seek out * proximate * causes. This doctrine 
is intended to supply a logical foundation to the above 
process. But who can ever say what are the * proximate 
causes ' } Thought, since it is admitted that it is 
unfortunately obliged to think according to the chain 
of causes, will never wish to know anything but ' true * 
causes, be they near or distant in space and time (space, 
like time, ne fait rien a V affaire). In reality, this theory 
is a fig-leaf, placed there to cover a proceeding of which 
the historian, who is a thinker and a critic, is ashamed, 



66 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

an act of will which is useful, but which for that very 
reason is wilful. The fig-leaf, however, is a sign of 
modesty, and as such has its value, because, if shame 
be lost, there is a risk that it will finally be declared that 
the * causes ' at which an arbitrary halt has been made 
are the * ultimate ' causes, the ' true ' causes, thus raising 
the caprice of the individual to the rank of an act creative 
of the world, treating it as though it were God, the God 
of certain theologians, whose caprice is truth. I should 
not wish again to quote Taine just after having said 
this, for he is a most estimable author, not on account 
of his mental constitution, but of his enthusiastic faith 
in science ; yet it suits me to quote him nevertheless. 
Taine, in his search for causes, having reached a cause 
which he sometimes calls the * race ' and sometimes 
the * age,' as for instance in his history of English 
literature, when he reaches the concept of the * man of 
the North ' or * German,* with the character and intellect 
that would be suitable to such a person — coldness of 
the senses, love of abstract ideas, grossness of taste, and 
contempt for order and regularity — gravely affirms: 
La s'arrete la recherche : on est tomhe sur quelque dis- 
position primitive, sur quelque trait propre a toutes les 
sensations, a toutes les conceptions d'un siecle ou d'une race, 
sur quelque particularity inseparable de toutes les demarches 
de son esprit et de son coeur, Ce sont la les grandes causes, 
les causes universelles et permanentes. What that primi- 
tive and insurmountable thing contained was known to 
Taine's imagination, but criticism is ignorant of it ; 
for criticism demands that the genesis of the facts or 
groups of facts designated as * age ' and ' race ' should 
be given, and in demanding their genesis declares that 
they are neither * universal ' nor * permanent,' because 
no universal and permanent * facts ' are known, as far 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 67 

as I am aware, certainly not le Germain and Vhomme du 
Nord ; nor are mummies facts, though they last some 
thousands of years, but not for ever — they change 
gradually, but they do change. 

Thus whoever adopts the deterministic conception 
of history, provided that he decides to abstain from 
cutting short the inquiry that he has undertaken in an 
arbitrary and fanciful manner, is of necessity obliged 
to recognize that the method adopted does not attain 
the desired end. And since he has begun to think 
history, although by means of an insufficient method, 
no course remains to him save that of beginning all 
over again and following a different path, or that of 
going forward but changing his direction. The 
naturalistic presupposition, which still holds its ground 
(" first collect the facts, then seek the causes " : what 
is more evident and more unavoidable than that .''), 
necessarily leads to the second alternative. But to 
adopt the second alternative is to supersede determinism, 
it is to transcend nature and its causes, it is to propose 
a method opposite to that hitherto followed — that is 
to say, to renounce the category of cause for another, 
which cannot be anything but that of end, an extrinsic 
and transcendental end, which is the analogous opposite, 
corresponding to the cause. Now the search for the 
transcendental end is the * philosophy of history.' 

The consequent naturalist (I mean by this he who 
* continues to think,' or, as is generally said, to draw the 
consequences) cannot avoid this inquiry, nor does he 
ever avoid it, in whatever manner he conceive his new 
inquiry. This he cannot even do, when he tries, by 
declaring that the end or ' ultimate cause ' is unknowable, 
because (as elsewhere remarked) an unknowable affirmed 
is an unknowable in some way known. Naturalism is 



68 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

always crowned with a philosophy of history, whatever 
its mode of formulation : whether it explain the universe 
as composed of atoms that strike one another and 
produce history by means of their various shocks and 
gyrations, to which they can also put an end by returning 
to their primitive state of dispersion, whether the hidden 
God be termed Matter or the Unconscious or something 
else, or whether, finally, He be conceived as an Intelli- 
gence which avails itself of the chain of causes in order 
to actualize His counsels. And every philosopher of 
history is on the other hand a naturalist, because he is a 
dualist and conceives a God and a world, an idea and a 
fact in addition to or beneath the Idea, a kingdom of 
ends and a kingdom or sub-kingdom of causes, a 
celestial city and one that is more or less diabolical or 
terrene. Take any deterministic historical work and 
you will find or discover in it, explicit or understood, 
transcendency (in Taine, for example, it goes by the 
name of * race ' or of * siecky which are true and proper 
deities) ; take any work of ' philosophy of history ' 
and dualism and naturalism will be found there (in 
Hegel, for example, when he admits rebellious and im- 
potent facts which resist or are unworthy the dominion 
of the idea). And we shall see more and more clearly 
how from the entrails of naturalism comes inevitably 
forth the * philosophy of history.* 



II 

But the * philosophy of history ' is just as contra- 
dictory as the deterministic conception from which it 
arises and to which it is opposed. Having both accepted 
and superseded the method of linking brute facts 
together, it no longer finds facts to link (for these have 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 69 

already been linked together, as well as might be, by means 
of the category of cause), but brute facts, on which it 
must confer rather a * meaning ' than a linking, repre- 
senting them as aspects of a transcendental process, 
a theophany. Now those facts, in so far as they are 
brute facts, are mute, and the transcendency of the 
process requires an organ, not that of thought that thinks 
or produces facts, but an extra-logical organ, in order 
to be conceived and represented (such, for example, 
as thought which proceeds abstractly a -priori^ in the 
manner of Fichte), and this is not to be found in the 
spirit, save as a negative moment, as the void of effective 
logical thought. The void of logical thought is imme- 
diately filled with praxis, or what is called sentiment, 
which then appears as poetry, by theoretical refraction. 
There is an evident poetical character running through all 
' philosophies of history.' Those of antiquity represented 
historical events as strife between the gods of certain 
peoples or of certain races or protectors of certain 
individuals, or between the god of light and truth and 
the powers of darkness and lies. They thus expressed 
the aspirations of peoples, groups, or individuals toward 
hegemony, or of man toward goodness and truth. 
The most modern of modern forms is that inspired by 
various national and ethical feelings (the Italian, the 
Germanic, the Slav, etc.), or which represents the course 
of history as leading to the kingdom of liberty, or as the 
passage from the Eden of primitive communism, through 
the Middle Ages of slavery, servitude, and wages, 
toward the restoration of communism, which shall no 
longer be unconscious but conscious, no longer Edenic 
but human. In poetry, facts are no longer facts but 
words, not reality but images, and so there would bei 
no occasion to censure them, if it remained pure poetry. 



70 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

But it does not so remain, because those images and 
words are placed there as ideas and facts — that is to 
say, as myths : progress, liberty, economy, technique, 
science are myths, in so far as they are looked upon as 
agents external to the facts. They are myths no less 
than God and the Devil, Mars and Venus, Jove and Baal, 
or any other cruder forms of divinity. And this is the 
reason why the deterministic conception, after it has 
produced the ' philosophy of history,' which opposes it, 
is obliged to oppose its own daughter in its turn, and 
to appeal from the realm of ends to that of causal 
connexions, from imagination to observation, from myths 
to facts. 

The reciprocal confutation of historical determinism 
and the philosophy of history, which makes of each 
a void or a nothing — that is to say, a single void or 
nothing — seems to the eclectics as usual to be the recip- 
rocal fulfilment of two entities, which effect or should 
effect an alliance for mutual support. And since eclecti- 
cism flourishes in contemporary philosophy, mutato nomine^ 
it is not surprising that besides the duty of investigating 
the causes to history also is assigned that of ascertaining 
the * meaning ' or the * general plan ' of the course of 
history (see the works on the philosophy of history of 
Labriola, Simmel, and Rickert). Since, too, writers 
on method are wont to be empirical and therefore 
eclectic, we find that with them also history is divided 
into the history which unites and criticizes documents and 
reconstructs events, and * philosophy of history ' (see 
Bernheim's manual, typical of all of them). Finally, since 
ordinary thought is eclectic, nothing is more easy than 
to find agreement as to the thesis that simple history, 
which presents the series of facts, does not suffice, but 
that it is necessary that thought should return to the 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 71 

already constituted chain of events, in order to discover 
there the hidden design and to ansv^er the questions as 
to whence we come and whither we go. This amounts 
to saying that a * philosophy of history * must be posited 
side by side with history. This eclecticism, which 
gives substance to two opposite voids and makes them 
join hands, sometimes attempts to surpass itself and 
to mingle those two fallacious sciences or parts of 
science. Then we hear * philosophy of history ' defended, 
but with the caution that it must be conducted with 
' scientific ' and * positive ' method, by means of the 
search for the cause, thus revealing the action of divine 
reason or providence.^ Ordinary thought quickly con- 
sents to this programme, but afterward fails to carry 
it out.2 

There is nothing new here either for those who know : 
* philosophy of history ' to be constructed by means of 
' positive methods,' transcendency to be demonstrated 
by means of the methods of false immanence, is the 
exact equivalent in the field of historical studies to that 
"metaphysic to be constructed by means of the ex- 
perimental method" which was recommended by the 
neocritics (Zeller and others), for it claimed, not indeed to 
supersede two voids that reciprocally confute one another, 

^ See, for example, the work of Flint ; but since, less radical than 
Flint, Hegel and the Hegelians themselves also ended in admitting the 
concourse of the two opposed methods, traces of this perversion are 
also to be found in their ' philosophies of history.' Here, too, is to be 
noted the false analogy by which Hegel was led to discover the same 
relation between a priori and historical facts as between mathematics 
and natural facts : Man muss mit dem Kreise dessen, worin die Prinzipien 
fallen, wenn man es so nennen will, a priori vertraut sein, so gut als Kepler 
mit den Ellipsen, mit Kuhen und Quadraten und mit den Gedanken von 
Verhdltnissen derselben a priori schon vorher bekannt sein musste, ehe er 
aus den empirischen Daten seine unsterblichen Gesetze, welche aus Bestim- 
mungen jener Kreise von Vorstellungen bestehen, erfinden konnte. (Cf. 
Vorles. lib. d. Philos. d. Gesch., ed. Brunstad, pp. 107-108.) 

^ Not even the above-mentioned Flint carried it out, for he lost him- 
self in preliminaries of historical documentation and never proceeded to 
the promised construction. 



72 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

but to make them agree together, and, after having given 
substance to them, to combine them in a single substance* 
I should not like to describe the impossibilities con- 
tained in the above as the prodigies of an alchemist 
(the metaphor seems to be too lofty), but rather as the 
medleys of bad cooks. 

Ill 

The true remedy for the contradictions of historical 
determinism and of the ' philosophy of history ' is quite 
other than this. To obtain it, we must accept the 
result of the preceding confutation, which shows that 
both are futile, and reject, as lacking thought, both 
the * designs ' of the philosophy of history and the 
causal chains of determinism. When these two shadows 
have been dispersed we shall find ourselves at the 
starting-place : we are again face to face with discon- 
nected brute facts, with facts that are connected, but 
not understood, for which determinism had tried to 
employ the cement of causality, the * philosophy of 
history,' the magic wand of finality. What shall we 
do with these facts ? How shall we make them clear 
rather than dense as they were, organic rather than 
inorganic, intelligible rather than unintelligible ? Truly, 
it seems difficult to do anything with them, especially 
to effect their desired transformation. The spirit is 
helpless before that which is, or is supposed to be, 
external to it. And when facts are understood in that 
way we are apt to assume again that attitude of 
contempt of the philosophers for history which has 
been well-nigh constant since antiquity almost to the 
end of the eighteenth century (for Aristotle history 
was " less philosophical " and less serious than poetry, 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 73 

for Sextus Empiricus it was " unmethodical material " ; 
Kant did not feel or understand history). The attitude 
amounts to this : leave ideas to the philosophers and 
brute facts to the historians — let us be satisfied with 
serious things and leave their toys to the children. 

But before having recourse to such a temptation, 
it will be prudent to ask counsel of methodical doubt 
(which is always most useful), and to direct the attention 
precisely upon those brute and disconnected facts from 
which the causal method claims to start and before which 
we, who are now abandoned by it and by its comple- 
ment, the philosophy of history, appear to find ourselves 
again. Methodical doubt will suggest above all things 
the thought that those facts are a presupposition that has 
not been proved, and it will lead to the inquiry as to 
whether the proof can he obtained. Having attempted 
the proof, we shall finally arrive at the conclusion that 
those facts really do not exist. 

For who, as a matter of fact, affirms their existence } 
Precisely the spirit, at the moment when it is about to 
undertake the search for causes. But when accom- 
plishing that act the spirit does not already possess 
the brute facts {d'abord la collection des faits) and then 
seek the causes (apres, la recherche des causes^, but 
it makes the, facts brute by that very act — that is to say, 
it posits them itself in that way, because it is of use to it 
so to posit them. The search for causes, undertaken by 
history, is not in any way different from the procedure 
of naturalism, already several times illustrated, which 
abstractly analyses and classifies reality. And to illus- 
trate abstractly and to classify implies at the same time 
to judge in classifying — that is to say, to treat facts, not 
as acts of the spirit, conscious in the spirit that thinks 
them, but as external brute facts. The Divine Comedy 



74 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

is that poem which we create again in our imagination 
in all its particulars as we read it and which we under- 
stand critically as a particular determination of the 
spirit, and to which we therefore assign its place in 
history, with all its surroundings and all its relations. 
But when this actuality of our thought and imagination 
has come to an end — that is to say, when that mental 
process is completed — we are able, by means of a new 
act of the spirit, separately to analyse its elements. Thus, 
for instance, we shall classify the concepts relating to 
* Florentine civilization,' or to ' political poetry,' and 
say that the Divine Comedy was an effect of Florentine 
civilization, and this in its turn an effect of the strife of 
the communes, and the like. We shall also thus have 
prepared the way for those absurd problems which 
used to annoy de Sanctis so much in relation to the 
work of Dante, and which he admirably described 
when he said that they arise only when lively aesthetic 
expression has grown cold and poetical work has fallen 
into the hands of dullards addicted to trifles. But if 
we stop in time and do not enter the path of those 
absurdities, if we restrict ourselves purely and simply 
to the naturalistic moment, to classification, and to the 
classificatory judgment (which is also causal connexion), 
in an altogether practical manner, without drawing any 
deductions from it, we shall have done nothing that is 
not perfectly legitimate; indeed, we shall be exercising 
our right and bowing to a rational necessity, which 
is that of naturalizing, when naturalization is of use, 
but not beyond those limits. Thus the materialization 
of the facts and the external or causal binding of them 
together are altogether justified as pure naturalism. 
And even the maxim which bids us to stop at * proximate ' 
causes — that is to say, not to force classification so far 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 75 

that it loses all practical utility — will find its justification. 
To place the concept of the Divine Comedy in relation 
to that of * Florentine civilization ' may be of use, but 
it will be of no use whatever, or infinitely less use, to 
place it in relation to the class of * Indo-European 
civilization ' or to the ' civilization of the white man.' 



IV 

Let us then return with greater confidence to the 
point of departure, the true point of departure — that is 
to say, not to that of facts already disorganized and 
naturalized, but to that of the mind that thinks and 
constructs the fact. Let us raise up the debased 
countenances of the calumniated * brute facts,' and 
we shall see the light of thought resplendent upon their 
foreheads. And that true point of departure will 
reveal itself not merely as a point of departure, but 
both as a point of arrival and of departure, not as the 
first step in historical construction, but the whole of 
history in its construction, which is also its self-con- 
struction. Historical determinism, and all the more 
* philosophy of history,' leave the reality of history behind 
them, though they directed their journey thither, a 
journey which became so erratic and so full of useless 
repetitions. 

We shall make the ingenuous Taine confess that 
what we are saying is the truth when we ask him what 
he means by the collection des faits and learn from him in 
reply that the collection in question consists of two 
stages or moments, in the first of which documents are 
revived in order to attain, a travers la distance des 
temps, Vhomme vivant, agissant, done de passions, muni 
d' habitudes, avec sa voix et sa physionomie, avec ses gestes 



76 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

et ses habits^ distinct et complet comme celui que tout a 
Vheure nous avons quitte dans la rue ; and in the second 
is sought and found sous Vhomme exterieur Vhomme 
interieur^ " Thomme invisible ^^ *'/<? centre^^ " le groupe 
des facultes et des sentiments qui produit le reste^'' *7^ drame 
interieur" ^^ la psychologies Something very different, 
then, from collections de faits ! If the things mentioned 
by our author really do come to pass, if we really do make 
live again in imagination individuals and events, and 
if we think what is within them — that is to say, if we 
think the synthesis of intuition and concept, which is 
thought in its concreteness — history is already achieved: 
what more is wanted ? There is nothing more to seek. 
Taine replies : " We must seek causes." That is to 
say, we must slay the living ' fact ' thought by thought, 
separate its abstract elements — a useful thing, no doubt, 
but useful for memory and practice. Or, as is the custom 
of Taine, we must misunderstand and exaggerate the 
value of the function of this abstract analysis, to lose 
ourselves in the mythology of races and ages, or in 
other different but none the less similar things. Let us 
beware how we slay poor facts, if we wish to think as 
historians, and in so far as we are such and really think 
in that way we shall not feel the necessity for having 
recourse either to the extrinsic bond of causes, historical 
determinism, or to that which is equally extrinsic of 
transcendental ends, philosophy of history. The fact 
historically thought has no cause and no end outside 
itself, but only in itself, coincident with its real qualities 
and with its qualitative reality. Because (it is well 
to note in passing) the determination of facts as real 
facts indeed, but of unknown nature, asserted but not 
understood, is itself also an illusion of naturalism 
(which thus heralds its other illusion, that of the * philo- 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 77 

sophy of history '). In thought, reality and quality, 
existence and essence, are all one, and it is not possible 
to affirm a fact as real without at the same time knowing 
what fact it is — that is, without qualifying it. 

Returning to and remaining in or moving in the 
concrete fact, or, rather, making of oneself thought that 
thinks the fact concretely, we experience the continual 
formation and the continual progress of our historical 
thought and also make clear to ourselves the history of 
historiography, which proceeds in the same manner. 
And we see how (I limit myself to this, in order not to 
allow the eye to wander too far) from the days of the 
Greeks to our own historical understanding has always 
been enriching and deepening itself, not because 
abstract causes and transcendental ends of human things 
have ever been recovered, but only because an ever 
increasing consciousness of them has been acquired. 
Politics and morality, religion and philosophy and art, 
science and culture and economy, have become more 
complex concepts and at the same time better determined 
and unified both in themselves and with respect to the 
whole. Correlatively with this, the histories of these 
forms of activity have become ever more complex 
and more firmly united. We know * the causes ' of 
civilization as little as did the Greeks ; and we know 
as little as they of the god or gods who control the 
fortunes of humanity. But we know the theory of 
civilization better than did the Greeks, and, for instance, 
we know (as they did not know, or did not know 
with equal clearness and security) that poetry is an 
eternal form of the theoretic spirit, that regression 
or decadence is a relative concept, that the world is 
not divided into ideas and shadows of ideas, or into 
potencies and acts, that slavery is not a category of the 



78 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

real, but a historical form of economic, and so forth. 
Thus it no longer occurs to anyone (save to the survivals 
or fossils, still to be found among us) to write the history 
of poetry on the principle of the pedagogic ends that the 
poets are supposed to have had in view : on the contrary, 
we strive to determine the forms expressive of their 
sentiments. We are not at all bewildered when we 
find ourselves before what are called * decadences,' but 
we seek out what new and greater thing was being 
developed by means of their dialectic. We do not 
consider the work of man to be miserable and illusory, 
and aspiration and admiration for the skies and for the 
ascesis joined thereunto and averse to earth as alone 
worthy of admiration and imitation. We recognize 
the reality of power in the act, and in the shadows the 
solidity of the ideas, and on earth heaven. Finally, 
we do not find that the possibility of social life is lost 
owing to the disappearance of the system of slavery. 
Such a disappearance would have been the catastrophe 
of reality, if slaves were natural to reality — and so forth. 
This conception of history and the consideration of 
historiographical work in itself make it possible for 
us to be just toward historical determinism and to 
the * philosophy of history,' which, by their continual 
reappearance, have continually pointed to the gaps in 
our knowledge, both historical and philosophical, and 
with their false provisional solutions have heralded the 
correct solutions of the new problems which we have 
been propounding. Nor has it been said that they will 
henceforth cease to exercise such a function (which is 
the beneficial function of Utopias of every sort). And 
although historical determinism and the * philosophy 
of history ' have no history, because they do not develop, 
they yet receive a content from the relation in which 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 79 

they stand to history, which does develop — that is to say, 
history develops in them, notwithstanding their cover- 
ing, extrinsic to their content, which compels to think 
even him who proposes to schematize and to imagine 
without thinking. For there is a great difference 
between the determinism that can now appear, after 
Descartes and Vico and Kant and Hegel, and that 
which appeared after Aristotle; between the philosophy 
of history of Hegel and Marx and that of gnosticism 
and Christianity. Transcendency and false immanency 
are at work in both these conceptions respectively ; 
but the abstract forms and mythologies that have 
appeared in more mature epochs of thought contain 
this new maturity in themselves. In proof of this, let 
us pause but a moment (passing by the various forms 
of naturalism) at the case of the * philosophy of history.' 
We observe already a great difference between the 
philosophy of history, as it appears in the Homeric 
world, and that of Herodotus, with whom the conception 
of the anger of the gods is a simulacrum of the moral 
law, which spares the humble and treads the proud 
underfoot; from Herodotus to the Fate of the Stoics, a 
law to which the gods themselves are subjected, and from 
this to the conception of Providence, which appears in 
late antiquity as wisdom that rules the world; from 
this pagan providence again to Christianity, which is 
divine justice, evangelical preparation, and educative 
care of the human race, and so on, to the refined provi- 
dence of the theologians, which as a rule excludes 
divine intervention and operates by means of secondary 
causes, to that of Vico, which operates as dialectic of 
the spirit, to the Idea of Hegel, which is the gradual 
conquest of the consciousness of self, which liberty 
achieves during the course of history, till we finally 



8o THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

reach the mythology of progress and of civilization, 
which still persists and is supposed to tend toward the 
final abolition of prejudices and superstitions, to be 
carried out by means of the increasing power and 
divulgation of positive science. 

In this way the * philosophy of history * and historical 
determinism sometimes attain to the thinness and 
transparency of a veil, which covers and at the same 
time reveals the concreteness of the real in thought. 
Mechanical causes thus appear idealized, transcendent 
deities humanized, and facts are in great part divested 
of their brutal aspect. But however thin the veil 
may be, it remains a veil, and however clear the truth 
may be, it is not altogether clear, for at bottom the 
false persuasion still persists that history is constructed 
with the * material ' of brute facts, with the * cement ' 
of causes, and with the * magic ' of ends, as with three 
successive or concurrent methods. The same thing 
occurs with religion, which in lofty minds liberates 
itself almost altogether from vulgar beliefs, as do its 
ethics from the heteronomy of the divine command 
and from the utilitarianism of rewards and punishments. 
Almost altogether, but not altogether, and for this 
reason religion will never be philosophy, save by 
negating itself, and thus the * philosophy of history * 
and historical determinism will become history only 
by negating themselves. The reason is that as long as 
they proceed in a positive manner dualism will also 
persist, and with it the torment of scepticism and 
agnosticism as a consequence. 

The negation of the philosophy of history, in history 
understood concretely, is its ideal dissolution, and since 
that so-called philosophy is nothing but an abstract 
and negative moment, our reason for affirming that 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 8i 

the philosophy of history is dead is clear. It is dead in 
its positivity, dead as a body of doctrine, dead in this 
way, with all the other conceptions and forms of the 
transcendental. I do not wish to attach to my brief 
(but in my opinion sufficient) treatment of the argument 
the addition of an explanation which to some will 
appear to be (as it appears to me) but little philosophical 
and even somewhat trivial. Notwithstanding, since 
I prefer the accusation of semi-triviality to that of 
equivocation, I shall add that since the criticism of 
the * concepts ' of cause and transcendental finality does 
not forbid the use of these ' words,' when they are 
simple words (to talk, for example, in an imaginative 
way of liberty as of a goddess, or to say, when about to 
undertake a study of Dante, that our intention is to 
' seek the cause * or * causes ' of this or that work or 
act of his), so nothing forbids our continuing to talk 
of * philosophy of history' and of philosophizing history, 
meaning the necessity of treating or of a better treatment 
of this or that historical problem. Neither does any- 
thing forbid our calling the researches of historical 
gnoseology ' philosophy of history,' although in this 
case we are treating the history, not properly of history^ 
but of historiography^ two things which are wont to be 
designated with the same word in Italian as in other 
languages. Neither do we wish to prevent the state- 
ment (as did a German professor years ago) that the 
* philosophy of history ' must be treated as * sociology * — 
that is to say, the adornment with that ancient title of 
so-called sociology, the empirical science of the state, of 
society and of culture. 

These denominations are all permissible in virtue 
of the same right as that invoked by the adventurer 
Casanova when he went before the magistrates in 



82 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

order to justify himself for having changed his name — 
"the right of every man to the letters of the alphabet." 
But the question treated above is not one of the letters 
of the alphabet. The ' philosophy of history,' of 
which we have briefly shown the genesis and the 
dissolution, is not one that is used in various senses, 
but a most definite mode of conceiving history — the 
transcendental mode. 



V 

THE POSITIVITY OF HISTORY 

WE therefore meet the well-known saying of 
Fustel de Coulanges that there are certainly 
"history and philosophy, but not the philo- 
sophy of history," with the following : there is neither 
philosophy nor history, nor philosophy of history, but 
history which is philosophy and philosophy which is 
history and is intrinsic to history. For this reason, all 
the controversies — and foremost of all those concerned 
with progress — which philosophers, methodologists of 
history, and sociologists believe to belong to their 
especial province, and flaunt at the beginning and the 
end of their treatises, are reduced for us to simple 
problems of philosophy, with historical motivation, all 
of them connected with the problems of which philo- 
sophy treats. 

In controversies relating to progress it is asked 
whether the work of man be fertile or sterile, whether 
it be lost or preserved, whether history have an end, 
and if so of what sort, whether this end be attainable in 
time or only in the infinite, whether history be progress 
or regress, or an interchange between progress and 
regress, greatness and decadence, whether good or 
evil prevail in it, and the like. When these questions 
have been considered with a little attention we shall 
see that they resolve themselves substantially into three 
points : the conception of development, that of end, and 
that of value. That is to say, they are concerned with 
the whole of reality, and with history only when it is 

83 



84 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

precisely the whole of reality. For this reason they 
do not belong to supposed particular sciences, to the 
philosophy of history, or to sociology, but to philosophy 
and to history in so far as it is philosophy. 

When the ordinary current terminology has been 
translated into philosophical terms it calls forth imme- 
diately the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis by means of 
which those problems have been thought and solved 
during the course of philosophy, to which the reader 
desirous of instruction must be referred. We can only 
mention here that the conception of reality as develop- 
ment is nothing but the synthesis of the two one-sided 
opposites, consisting of permanency without change 
and of change without permanency, of an identity 
without diversity and of a diversity without identity, 
for development is a perpetual surpassing, which is at 
the same time a perpetual conservation. From this 
point of view one of the conceptions that has had the 
greatest vogue in historical books, that of historical 
circles^ is revealed as an equivocal attempt to issue forth 
from a double one-sidedness and a falling back into it, 
owing to an equivocation. Because either the series 
of circles is conceived as composed of identicals and we 
have only permanency, or it is conceived as of things 
diverse and we have only change. But if, on the co n 
trary, we conceive it as circularity that is perpetually 
identical and at the same time perpetually diverse, in this 
sense it coincides with the conception of development 
itself. 

In like manner, the opposite theses, as to the attain- 
ment or the impossibility of attainment of the end of 
history, reveal their common defect of positing the end 
as extrinsic to history, conceiving of it either as that 
which can be reached in time {progressus ad finitum), 



THE POSITIVITY OF HISTORY 85 

or as that which can never be attained, but only infinitely- 
approximated (j)rogressus ad infinitum). But where the end 
has been correctly conceived as internal — that is to say, 
all one with development itself — ^we must conclude that 
it is attained at every instant, and at the same time not 
attained, because every attainment is the formation of 
a new prospect, whence we have at every moment 
the satisfaction of possession, and arising from this 
the dissatisfaction which drives us to seek a new 
possession.^ 

Finally, the conceptions of history as a passage from 
evil to good (progress), or from good to evil (decadence, 
regression), take their origin from the same error of 
entifying and making extrinsic good and evil, joy and 
sorrow (which are the dialectical construction of reality 
itself). To unite them in the eclectic conception of 
an alternation of good and evil, of progress and regress, 
is incorrect. The true solution is that of progress 
understood not as a passage from evil to good, as though 
from one state to another, but as the passage from the 
good to the better, in which the evil is the good itself 
seen in the light of the better. 

These are all philosophical solutions which are at 
variance with the superficial theses of controversialists 
(dictated to them by sentimental motives or imaginative 
combinations, really mythological or resulting in mytho- 
logies), to the same extent that they are in accordance 
with profound human convictions and with the tireless 
toil, the trust, the courage, which constitute their ethical 
manifestations. 

By drawing the consequences of the dialectical con- 

^ For the complete development of these conceptions, see my study 
of The Conception of Becoming, in the Saggio sullo Hegel seguito da aliri 
scritti di storia della filosofia, pp. 149-175 (Bari, 1913). (English transla- 
tion of the work on Hegel by Douglas Ainslie. Macmillan, London.) 



86 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

ception of progress something more immediately effective 
can be achieved in respect to the practice and history of 
historiography. For we find in that conception the 
origin of a historical maxim, in the mouth of every one, 
yet frequently misunderstood and frequently violated — 
that is to say, that to history pertains not to judge, but 
to explain, and that it should be not subjective but 
objective. 

Misunderstood, because the judging in question is 
often taken in the sense of logical judgment, of that 
judgment which is thinking itself, and the subjectivity, 
which would thus be excluded, would be neither 
more nor less than the subjectivity of thought. In 
consequence of this misunderstanding we hear his- 
torians being advised to purge themselves of theories, 
to refrain from the disputes arising from them, to 
restrict themselves to facts, collecting, arranging, and 
squeezing out the sap (even by the statistical method). 
It is impossible to follow such advice as this, as may 
easily be seen, for such ' abstention from thought ' 
reveals itself as really abstention from * seriousness of 
thought,' as a surreptitious attaching of value to the most 
vulgar and contradictory thoughts, transmitted by tradi- 
tion, wandering about idly in the mind, or flashing out 
as the result of momentary caprice. The maxim is 
altogether false, understood or misunderstood in this 
way, and it must be taken by its opposite — namely, that 
history must always judge strictly, and that it must 
always be energetically subjective without allowing itself 
to be confused by the conflicts in which thought engages 
or by the risks that it runs. For it is thought itself, 
and thought alone, which gets over its own difficulties 
and dangers, without falling even here into that frivolous 
eclecticism which tries to find a middle term between 



THE POSITIVITY OF HISTORY 87 

our judgment and that of others, and suggests various 
neufra/ and insipid forms of judgment. 

But the true and legitimate meaning, the original 
motive for that 'judging,' that 'subjectivity,* which it 
condemns, is that history should not apply to the deeds 
and the personages that are its material the qualifica- 
tions of good and evil, as though there really were good 
and evil facts in the world, people who are good and 
people who are evil. And it is certainly not to be 
denied that innumerable historiographers, or those who 
claim to be historiographers, have really striven and still 
strive along those lines, in the vain and presumptuous 
attempt to reward the good and punish the evil, to 
qualify historical epochs as representing progress or 
decadence — in a word, to settle what is good and what 
is evil, as though it were a question of separating one 
element from another in a compound, hydrogen from 
oxygen. 

Whoever desires to observe intrinsically the above 
maxim, and by doing so to set himself in accordance 
with the dialectic conception of progress, must in truth 
look upon every trace or vestige of propositions affirming 
evil, regression, or decadence as real facts, as a sign 
of imperfection — in a word, he must condemn every 
trace or vestige of negative judgments. If the course 
of history is not the passage from evil to good, or alter- 
native good and evil, but the passage from the good to 
the better, if history should explain and not condemn, 
it will pronounce only positive judgments, and will forge 
chains of good, so solid and so closely linked that it 
will not be possible to introduce into them even a little 
link of evil or to interpose empty spaces, which in so far 
as they are empty would not represent good but evil. 
A fact that seems to be only evil, an epoch that appears 



88 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

to be one of complete decadence, can be nothing but a 
non-historical fact — that is to say, one which has not been 
historically treated, not penetrated by thought, and which 
has remained the prey of sentiment and imagination. 

Whence comes the phenomenology of good and evil, 
of sin and repentance, of decadence and resurrection, 
save from the consciousness of the agent, from the act 
which is in labour to produce a new form of life ? ^ 
And in that act the adversary who opposed us is in the 
wrong; the state from which we wish to escape, and 
from which we are escaping, is unhappy; the new one 
toward which we are tending becomes symbolized as 
a dreamed-of felicity to be attained, or as a past condi- 
tion to restore, which is therefore most beautiful in 
recollection (which here is not recollection, but imagina- 
tion). Every one knows how these things present them- 
selves to us in the course of history, manifesting them- 
selves in poetry, in Utopias, in stories with a moral, 
in detractions, in apologies, in myths of love, of hate, 
and the like. To the heretics of the Middle Ages and to 
the Protestant reformers the condition of the primitive 
Christians seemed to be most lovely and most holy, 
that of papal Christians most evil and debased. The 
Sparta of Lycurgus and the Rome of Cincinnatus seemed 
to the Jacobins to be as admirable as France under the 
Carlovingians and the Capetians was detestable. The 
humanists looked upon the lives of the ancient poets and 
sages as luminous and the life of the Middle Ages as 
dense darkness. Even in times near our own has been 
witnessed the glorification of the Lombard communes and 
the depreciation of the Holy Roman Empire, and the very 
opposite of this, according as the facts relating to these 

^ For what relates to this section, see my treatment of Judgments of 
Value, in the work before cited. 



THE POSITIVITY OF HISTORY 89 

historical events were reflected in the consciousness of 
an Italian longing for the independence of Italy or of a 
German upholding the holy German empire of Prussian 
hegemony. And this will always happen, because such 
is the phenomenology of the practical consciousness, 
and these practical valuations will always be present to 
some extent in the works of historians. As works, these 
are not and cannot ever be pure history, quintessential 
history ; if in no other way, then in their phrasing 
and use of metaphors they will reflect the repercussion 
of practical needs and efforts directed toward the 
future. But the historical consciousness, as such, is 
logical and not practical consciousness, and indeed makes 
the other its object ; history once lived has become in 
it thought, and the antitheses of will and feeling that 
formerly offered resistance have no longer a place in 
thought. 

For if there are no good and evil facts, but facts that 
are always good when understood in their intimate being 
and concreteness, there are not opposite sides, but that 
wider side that embraces both the adversaries and which 
happens just to be historical consideration. Historical 
consideration, therefore, recognizes as of equal right the 
Church of the catacombs and that of Gregory VII, the 
tribunes of the Roman people and the feudal barons, 
the Lombard League and the Emperor Barbarossa. 
History never metes out justice, but always justifies ; 
she could not carry out the former act without making 
herself unjust — that is to say, confounding thought with 
life, taking the attractions and repulsions of sentiment 
for the judgments of thought. 

Poetry is satisfied with the expression of sentiment, and 
it is worthy of note that a considerable historian, Schlosser, 
wishing to reserve for himself the right and duty of 



90 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

judging historical facts with Kantian austerity and 
abstraction, kept his eyes fixed on the Divine Comedy — 
that is to say, a poetical work — as his model of treatment. 
And since there are poetical elements in all myths, we 
understand why the conception of history known as 
dualistic — that is to say, of history as composed of two 
currents, which mix but never resolve in one another 
their waters of good and evil, truth and error, rationality 
and irrationality — should have formed a conspicuous part, 
not only of the Christian religion, but also of the mytho- 
logies (for they really are such) of humanism and of 
illuminism. But the detection of this problem of the 
duality of values and its solution in the superior unity 
of the conception of development is the work of the 
nineteenth century, which on this account and on account 
of other solutions of the same kind (certainly not on 
account of its philological and archaeological richness, 
which was relatively common to the four preceding 
centuries) has been well called * the century of history.' 

Not only, therefore, is history unable to discriminate 
between facts that are good and facts that are evil, and 
between epochs that are progressive and those that are 
regressive, but it does not begin until the psychological 
conditions which rendered possible such antitheses have 
been superseded and substituted by an act of the spirit, 
which seeks to ascertain what function the fact or the 
epoch previously condemned has fulfilled — that is to say^ 
what it has produced of its own in the course of develop- 
ment, and therefore what it has produced. And since 
all facts and epochs are productive in their own way, 
not only is not one of them to be condemned in the 
light of history, but all are to be praised and vener- 
ated. A condemned fact, a fact that is repugnant, is 
not yet a historical proposition, it is hardly even the 



THE POSITIVITY OF HISTORY 91 

premiss of a historical problem to be formulated. A 
negative history is a non-history so long as its negative 
process substitutes itself for thought, which is affirmative, 
and does not maintain itself within its practical and 
moral bounds and limit itself to poetical expressions 
and empirical modes of representation, in respect of 
all of which we can certainly speak (speak and not think), 
as we do speak at every moment, of bad men and 
periods of decadence and regression. 

If the vice of negative history arises from the separa- 
tion, the solidification, and the opposition of the dialectical 
antitheses of good and evil and the transformation of 
the ideal moments of development into entities, that 
other deviation of history which may be known as elegiac 
history arises from the misunderstanding of another 
necessity of that conception — that is to say, the perpetual 
constancy, the perpetual conservation of what has been 
acquired. But this is also false by definition. What 
is preserved and enriched in the course of history is 
history itself, spirituality. The past does not live other- 
wise than in the present, as the force of the present, 
resolved and transformed in the present. Every parti- 
cular form, individual, action, institution, work, thought, 
is destined to perish: even art, which is called eternal 
(and is so in a certain sense), perishes, for it does not 
live, save to the extent that it is reproduced, and therefore 
transfigured and surrounded with new light, in the spirit 
of posterity. Finally, truth itself perishes, particular 
and determined truth, because it is not rethinkable, 
save when included in the system of a vaster truth, 
and therefore at the same time transformed. But those 
who do not rise to the conception of pure historical 
consideration, those who attach themselves with their 
whole soul to an individual, a work, a belief, an 



92 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

institution, and attach themselves so strongly that they 
cannot separate themselves from it in order to objectify 
it before themselves and think it, are prone to attribute 
the immortality which belongs to the spirit in universal 
to the spirit in one of its particular and determined 
forms ; and since that form, notwithstanding their 
efforts, dies, and dies in their arms, the universe darkens 
before their gaze, and the only history that they can 
relate is the sad one of the agony and death of beautiful 
things. This too is poetry, and very lofty poetry. Who 
can do otherwise than weep at the loss of a beloved 
one, at separation from something dear to him, cannot see 
the sun extinguished and the earth tremble and the birds 
cease their flight and fall to earth, like Dante, on the 
loss of his beloved " who was so beautiful " ? But 
history is never history of death, but history of life, and all 
know that the proper commemoration of the dead is 
the knowledge of what they did in life, of what they 
produced that is working in us, the history of their life 
and not of their death, which it behoves a gentle soul 
to veil, a soul barbarous and perverse to exhibit in its 
miserable nakedness and to contemplate with unhealthy 
persistence. For this reason all histories which narrate 
the death and not the life of peoples, of states, of insti- 
tutions, of customs, of literary and artistic ideals, of 
religious conceptions, are to be considered false, or, we 
repeat, simply poetry, where they attain to the level of 
poetry. People grow sad and suffer and lament because 
that which was is no longer. This would resolve itself 
into a mere tautology (because if it was, it is evident 
that it is no longer), were it not conjoined to the neglect 
of recognizing what of that past has not perished — 
that is to say, that past in so far as it is not past but 
present, the eternal life of the past. It is in this neglect. 



THE POSITIVITY OF HISTORY 93 

in the incorrect view arising out of it, that the falsity 
of such histories resides. 

It sometimes happens that historians, intent upon 
narrating those scenes of anguish in a lugubrious manner 
and upon celebrating the funerals which it pleases them 
to call histories, remain partly astounded and partly 
scandalized when they hear a peal of laughter, a cry 
of joy, a sigh of satisfaction, or find an enthusiastic im- 
pulse springing up from the documents that they are 
searching. How, they ask, could men live, make love, 
reproduce their species, sing, paint, discuss, when the 
trumps were sounding east and west to announce the 
end of the world ? But they do not see that such an 
end of the world exists only in their own imaginations, 
rich in elegiac motives, but poor in understanding. 
They do not perceive that such importunate trumpet- 
calls have never in reality existed. These are very 
useful, on the other hand, for reminding those who may 
have forgotten it that history always pursues her in- 
defatigable work, and that her apparent agonies are the 
travail of a new birth, and that what are believed to be 
her expiring sighs are moans that announce the birth 
of a new world. History differs from the individual 
who dies because, in the words of Alcmaeon of Crete, 

he is not able rrjv apxn^ t<3 riXet Trpocrd-ylraCy tO join his 

beginning to his end : history never dies, because she 
always joins her beginning to her end. 



VI 

THE HUMANITY OF HISTORY 

ENFRANCHISING itself from servitude to extra- 
mundane caprice and to blind natural necessity, 
freeing itself from transcendency and from false 
immanence (which is in its turn transcendency), thought 
conceives history as the work of man, as the product 
of human will and intellect, and in this manner enters 
that form of history which we shall call humanistic. 

This humanism first appears as in simple contrast 
to nature or to extra-mundane powers, and posits 
dualism. On the one side is man, with his strength, 
his intelligence, his reason, his prudence, his will for 
the good ; on the other there is something that resists 
him, strives against him, upsets his wisest plans, breaks 
the web that he has been weaving and obliges him to 
weave it all over again. History, envisaged from the 
view-point of this conception, is developed entirely 
from the first of these two sides, because the other does 
not afford a dialectical element which can be continually 
met and superseded by the first, giving rise to a sort 
of interior collaboration, but represents the absolutely 
extraneous, the capricious, the accidental, the meddler, 
the ghost at the feast. Only in the former do we find 
rationality combined with human endeavour, and thus 
the possibility of a rational explication of history. What 
comes from the other side is announced, but not explained : 
it is not material for history, but at the most for chronicle. 

This first form of humanistic history is known under 
the various names of rationalistic, intellectualistic, abstract- 
94 



THE HUMANITY OF HISTORY 95 

istic, individualistic^ psychological history, and especially 
under that oi pragmatic history. It is a form generally 
condemned by the consciousness of our times, which 
has employed these designations, especially rationalism 
and pragmatism., to represent a particular sort of historio- 
graphical insufficiency and inferiority, and has made 
proverbial the most characteristic pragmatic explanations 
of institutions and events, as types of misrepresentation 
into which one must beware of falling if one wish to 
think history seriously. But as happens in the progress 
of culture and science, even if the condemnation be 
cordially accepted and no hesitation entertained as to 
drawing practical consequences from it in the field of 
actuality, there is not an equally clear consciousness of 
the reasons for this, or of the thought process by means 
of which it has been attained. This process we may 
briefly describe as follows. 

Pragmatic finds the reasons for historical facts in 
man, but in man in so far as he is an individual made 
abstract, and thus opposed as such not only to the universe, 
but to other men, who have also been made abstract. 
History thus appears to consist of the mechanical action 
and reaction of beings, each one of whom is shut up in 
himself. Now no historical process is intelligible under 
such an arrangement, for the sum of the addition is 
always superior to the numbers added. To such an 
extent is this true that, not knowing which way to 
turn in order to make the sum come out right, it became 
necessary to excogitate the doctrine of * little causes,' 
which were supposed to produce * great effects.* This 
doctrine is absurd, for it is clear that great effects can only 
have real causes (if the illegitimate conceptions of great 
and small, of cause and effect, be applicable here). Such 
a formula, then, far from expressing the law of historical 



96 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

facts, unconsciously expresses the defects of the doctrine, 
which is inadequate for its purpose. And since the 
rational explanation fails, there arise crowds of fancies 
to take its place, which are all conceived upon the funda- 
mental motive of the abstract individual. The prag- 
matic explanation of religions is characteristic of this ; 
these are supposed to have been produced and maintained 
in the world by the economic cunning of the priests, 
taking advantage of the ignorance and credulity of the 
masses. But historical pragmatic does not always 
present itself in the guise of this egoistic and pessimistic 
inspiration. It is not fair to accuse it of egoism and 
utilitarianism, when the true accusation should, as we 
have already said, be levelled at its abstract individualism. 
This abstract individualism could be and sometimes was 
conceived even as highly moral, for we certainly find 
among the pragmatics sage legislators, good kings, and 
great men, who benefit humanity by means of science, 
inventions, and well-organized institutions. And if 
the greedy priest arranged the deceit of religions, if 
the cruel despot oppressed weak and innocent people, 
and if error was prolific and engendered the strangest 
and most foolish customs, yet the goodness of the 
enlightened monarch and legislator created the happy 
epochs, caused the arts to flourish, encouraged poets, 
aided discoveries, encouraged industries. From these 
pragmatic conceptions is derived the verbal usage whereby 
we speak of the age of Pericles, of that of Augustus, of 
that of Leo X, or of that of Louis XIV. And since 
fanciful explanations do not limit themselves merely to 
individuals physically existing, but also employ facts and 
small details, which are also made abstract and shut up 
in themselves, being thus also turned into what Vico 
describes as * imaginative universals,' in like manner 



THE HUMANITY OF HISTORY 97 

all those modes of explanation known as ' catastrophic ' 
and making hinge the salvation or the ruin of a whole 
society upon the virtue of some single fact are also 
derived from pragmatic. Examples of this, which have 
also become proverbial, because they refer to concepts 
that have been persistently criticized by the historians 
of our time, are the fall of the Roman Empire, ex- 
plained as the result of barbarian invasions, European 
civilization of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as 
the result of the Crusades, the renascence of classical 
literatures, as the result of the Turkish conquest of 
Constantinople and of the immigration of the learned 
Byzantines into Italy — and the like. And in just the 
same way as when the conception of the single individual 
did not furnish a sufficient explanation recourse was 
for that reason had to a multiplicity of individuals, 
to their co-operation and conflicting action, so here, 
when the sole cause adduced soon proved itself too 
narrow, an attempt was made to make up for the 
insufficiency of the method by the search for and 
enumeration of multiple historical causes. This enumera- 
tion threatened to proceed to the infinite, but, finite or 
infinite as it might be, it never explained the process 
to be explained, for the obvious reason that the con- 
tinuous is never made out of the discontinuous, how- 
ever much the latter may be multiplied and solidified. 
The so-called theory of the causes or factors of history, 
which survives in modern consciousness, together with 
several other mental habits of pragmatic, although 
generally inclined to follow other paths, is rather a 
confession of powerlessness to dominate history by 
means of individual causes, or causes individually 
conceived, than a theory ; far from being a solution, 
it is but a reopening of the problem. 



98 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

Pragmatic therefore fails to remain human — that is 
to say, to develop itself as rationality ; even in the 
human side to which it clings and in which it wishes 
to maintain and oppose itself to the natural or extra- 
natural ; and having already made individuals irrational 
and unhuman by making them abstract, it gradually 
has recourse to other historical factors, and arrives 
finally at natural causes, which do not differ at all in 
their abstractness from other individual causes. This 
means that pragmatic, which had previously asserted 
itself as humanism, falls back into naturalism, from which 
it had distinctly separated itself. And it falls into it 
all the more, seeing that, as has been noted, human 
individuals have been made abstract, not only among 
themselves, but toward the rest of the universe, which 
remains facing them, as though it were an enemy. 
What is it that really rules history according to this 
conception ? Is it man, or extra-human powers, natural 
or divine ? The claim that history exists only as 
an individual experience is not maintainable ; and in 
the pragmatic conception another agent in history is 
always presumed, an extra-human being which, at 
different times and to different thinkers, is known as 
fate, chance, fortune, nature, God, or by some other 
name. During the period at which pragmatic history 
flourished, and there was much talk of reason and 
wisdom, an expression of a monarchical or courtly tinge 
is to be found upon the lips of a monarch and of a 
philosopher who was his friend : homage was paid to 
sa Majeste le Hasard ! Here too there is an attempt to 
patch up the difficulty and to seek eclectic solutions; 
in order to get out of it, we find pragmatic 
affirming that human affairs are conducted half by 
prudence and half by fortune, that intelligence con- 



THE HUMANITY OF HISTORY 99 

tributes one part, fortune another, and so on. But 
who will assign the just share to the two competitors ? 
Will not he who does assign it be the true and only 
maker of history ? And since he who does assign 
it cannot be man, we see once again how pragmatic 
leads directly to transcendency and irrationality through 
its naturalism. It leads to irrationality, accompanied by 
all its following of inconveniences and by all the other 
dualisms that it brings with it and which are particular 
aspects of itself, such as the impossibility of develop- 
ment, regressions, the triumph of evil. The individual, 
engaged with external forces however conceived, some- 
times wins, at other times loses ; his victory itself is 
precarious, and the enemy is always victorious, inflicting 
losses upon him and making his victories precarious. 
Individuals are ants crushed by a piece of rock, and if 
some ant escapes from the mass that falls upon it and 
reproduces the species, which begins again the labour 
from the beginning, the rock will fall, or always may 
fall, upon the new generation and may crush all of its 
members, so that it is the arbiter of the lives of the 
industrious ants, to which it does much injury and 
no good. This is as pessimistic a view as can be 
conceived. 

These difficulties and vain tentatives of pragmatic 
historiography have caused it to be looked upon with 
disfavour and to be rejected in favour of a superior 
conception, which preserves the initial humanistic 
motive and, removing from it the abstractness of the 
atomicized individual, assures it against any falling 
back into agnosticism, transcendency, or the despair 
caused by pessimism. The conception that has com- 
pleted the criticism of pragmatic and the redemption 
of humanism has been variously and more or less well 



loo THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

formulated in the course of the history of thought as 
mind or reason that constructs history, as the * provi- 
dence ' of mind or the * astuteness ' of reason. 

The great value of this conception is that it changes 
humanism from abstract to concrete, from monadistic 
or atomistic to idealistic, from something barely human 
into something cosmic, from unhuman humanism, 
such as that of man shut up in himself and opposed to 
man, into humanism that is really human, the humanity 
common to men, indeed to the whole universe, which 
is all humanity, even in its most hidden recesses — that 
is to say, spirituality. And history, according to this 
conception, as it is no longer the work of nature or of 
an extra-mundane God, so it is not the impotent work 
of the empirical and unreal individual, interrupted at 
every moment, but the work of that individual which 
is truly real and is the eternal spirit individualizing 
itself. For this reason it has no adversary at all opposed 
to it, but every adversary is at the same time its subject 
— that is to say, is one of the aspects of that dialecticism 
which constitutes its inner being. Again, it does not 
seek its principle of explanation in a particular act of 
thought or will, or in a single individual or in a multitude 
of individuals, or in an event given as the cause of other 
events, or in a collection of events that form the cause of 
a single event, but seeks and places it in the process 
itself, which is born of thought and returns to thought, 
and is intelligible through the auto-intelligibility of 
thought, which never has need of appealing to anything 
external to itself in order to understand itself. The 
explanation of history becomes so truly, because it 
coincides with its explication; whereas explanation by 
means of abstract causes is a breaking up of the process ; 
the living having been slain, there is a forced attempt 



THE HUMANITY OF HISTORY loi 

made to obtain life by setting the severed head again 
upon the shoulders. 

When the historians of our day, and the many sensible 
folk who do not make a profession of philosophy, repeat 
that the history of the world does not depend upon the 
will of individuals, upon such accidents as the length 
of Cleopatra's nose, or upon anecdotes ; that no historical 
event has ever been the result of deception or misunder- 
standing, but that all have been due to persuasion 
and necessity; that there is some one who has more 
intelligence than any individual whatever — the world; 
that the explanation of a fact is always to be sought 
in the entire organism and not in a single part torn 
from the other parts ; that history could not have 
been developed otherwise than it has developed, and 
that it obeys its own iron logic ; that every fact has its 
reason and that no individual is completely wrong; and 
numberless propositions of the same sort, which I have 
assembled promiscuously — they are perhaps not aware 
that with such henceforth obvious statements they are 
repeating the criticism of pragmatic history (and 
implicitly that of theological and naturalistic history) 
and affirming the truth of idealistic history. Were they 
aware of this, they would not mingle with these proposi- 
tions others which are their direct contradiction, relating 
to causes, accidents, decadences, climates, races, and so 
on, which represent the detritus of the conception that 
has been superseded. For the rest, it is characteristic 
of the consciousness called common or vulgar to drag 
along with it an abundant detritus of old, dead 
concepts mingled with the new ones ; but this does 
not detract from the importance of its enforced recog- 
nition of the new concept, which it substantially follows 
in its judgments. 



I02 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

Owing to the already mentioned resolution of all 
historiographical questions into general philosophy, it 
would not be possible to give copious illustrations of the 
new concept of history which the nineteenth century 
has accepted in place of the pragmatic conception 
without giving a lengthy exposition of general philosophy, 
which, in addition to the particular inconvenience its 
presence would have here, would lead to the repetition 
of things elsewhere explained. Taking the position 
that history is the work, not of the abstract individual, 
but of reason or providence, as admitted, I intend 
rather to correct an erroneous mode of expressing that 
doctrine which I believe that I have detected. I 
mean the form given to it by Vico and by Hegel, 
according to which Providence or Reason makes use 
of the particular ends and passions of men, in order to 
conduct them unconsciously to more lofty spiritual 
conditions, making use for this purpose of benevolent 
cunning. 

Were this form exact, or were it necessary to take it 
literally (and not simply as an imaginative and pro- 
visional expression of the truth), I greatly fear that a 
shadow of dualism and transcendency would appear in 
the heart of the idealistic conception. For in this 
position of theirs toward the Idea or Providence, 
individuals would have to be considered, if not as 
deluded (satisfied indeed beyond their desires and 
hopes), then certainly as illuded, even though bene- 
volently illuded. Individuals and Providence, or indi- 
viduals and Reason, would not make one, but two ; and 
the individual would be inferior and the Idea superior — 
that is to say, dualism and the reciprocal transcendency 
of God and the world would persist. This, on the other 
hand, would not be at variance from the historical point 



THE HUMANITY OF HISTORY 103 

of view with what has been several times observed as to 
the theological residue at the bottom of Hegel's, and 
yet more of Vico's, thought. Now the claim of the 
idealistic conception is that individual and Idea make 
one and not two — that is to say, perfectly coincide and 
are identified. For this reason, there must be no talking 
(save metaphorically) of the wisdom of the Idea and of 
the folly or illusion of individuals. 

Nevertheless it seems indubitably certain that the 
individual acts through the medium of infinite illu- 
sions, proposing to himself ends that he fails to attain 
and attaining ends that he has not seen. Schopen- 
hauer (imitating Hegel) has made popular the illusions 
of love, by means of which the will leads the indi- 
vidual to propagate the species; and we all know that 
illusions are not limited to those that men and women 
exercise toward one another {les tromperies reciproques\ 
but that they enter into our every act, which is always 
accompanied by hopes and mirages that are not fol- 
lowed by realization. And the illusion of illusions seems 
to be this : that the individual believes himself to be 
toiling to live and to intensify his life more and more, 
whereas he is really toiling to die. He wishes to see 
his work completed as the affirmation of his life, and 
its completion is the passing away of the work; he toils 
to obtain peace in life, but peace is on the contrary 
death, which alone is peace. How then are we to deny 
this dualism between the illusion of the individual and 
the reality of the work, between the individual and the 
Idea } How are we to refute the only explanation 
which seems to compose in some measure the discord — 
namely, that the Idea turns the illusions of the individual 
to its own ends, even though this doctrine lead inevit- 
ably to a sort of transcendency of the Idea ? 



I04 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

But the real truth is that what results from the obser- 
vations and objections above exposed is not the illusion 
of the individual who loves, who tries to complete his 
work, who sighs for peace, but rather the illusion of 
him who believes that the individual is illuded: the 
illusory is the illusion itself. And this illusion appears 
in the phenomenology of the spirit as the result of the 
well-known abstractive process, which breaks up unity 
in an arbitrary manner and in this case separates the re- 
sult from the process or actual acting, in which alone 
the former is real ; the accompaniment from the accom- 
panied, which is all one with the accompaniment, 
because there is not spirit and its escort, but only the 
one spirit in its development, the single moments of 
the process, of the continuity, which is their soul ; and 
so on. That illusion arises in the individual when he 
begins to reflect upon himself, and at the beginning of 
that reflection, which is at the same time a dialectical 
process. But in concrete reflection, or rather in con- 
crete consciousness, he discovers that there is no end 
that has not been realized, as well as it could, in the 
process, in which it was never an absolute end — that is 
to say, an abstract end, but both a means and an end. 

To return to the popular theory of Schopenhauer, 
only he who looks upon men as animals, or worse than 
animals, can believe that love is a process that leads 
only to the biological propagation of the species, when 
every man knows that he fecundates his own soul above 
all prior to the marriage couch, and that images and 
thoughts and projects and actions are created before chil- 
dren and in addition to them. Certainly, we are conscious 
of the moments of an action as it develops — that is to 
say, of its passage and not of its totality seen in the light 
of a new spiritual situation, such as we strive to obtain 



THE HUMANITY OF HISTORY 105 

when, as we say, we leave the tumult behind us and set 
ourselves to write our own history. But there is no 
illusion, either now or then ; neither now nor then is 
there the abstract individual face to face with a Provi- 
dence who succeeds in deceiving him for beneficial 
ends, acting rather as a doctor than as a serious educator, 
and treating the race of men as though they were 
animals to train and make use of, instead of men to 
educate — that is to say, develop. 

After having concentrated the mind upon a thought 
of Vico and of Hegel, can it be possible to set ourselves 
down to examine those of others which afford material 
to the controversies of historians and methodologists 
of history of our time ? These represent the usual 
form in which appear the problems concerning the re- 
lation between the individual and the Idea, between 
pragmatic and idealistic history. Perhaps the patience 
necessary for the descent into low haunts is meritorious 
and our duty ; perhaps there may be some useful con- 
clusion to be drawn from these common disputes ; but 
I must beg to be excused for not taking part in them and 
for limiting myself to the sole remark that the question 
which has been for some time discussed, whether history 
be the history of * masses * or of * individuals,' would be 
laughable in its very enunciation, if we were to under- 
stand by ' mass ' what the word implies, a complex of 
individuals. And since it is not a good method to attri- 
bute laughable ideas to adversaries, it may be supposed 
that on this occasion what is meant by * mass ' is some- 
thing else, which moves the mass of individuals. In 
this case, anyone can see that the problem is the same 
as that which has just been examined. The conflict 
between * collectivistic ' and ' individualistic ' historio- 
graphy will never be composed so long as the former 



io6 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

assigns to collectivity the power that is creative of ideas 
and institutions, and the latter assigns it to the individual 
of genius, for both affirmations are true in what they 
include and false in what they exclude — that is to say, 
not only in their exclusion of the opposed thesis, but 
also in the tacit exclusion, which they both make, of 
totality as idea. 

A warning as to a historiographical method, so 
similar in appearance to that which I have been defending 
as to be confounded with it, may perhaps be more 
opportune. This method, which is variously called 
sociological^ institutional^ and of values^ preserves among 
the variety of its content and the inequality of mental 
level noticeable in its supporters the general and con- 
stant characteristic of believing that true history consists 
of the history of societies, institutions, and human 
values, not of individual values. The history of in- 
dividuals, according to this view, is excluded, as being 
a parallel or inferior history, and its inferiority is held 
to be due either to the slight degree of interest that it 
is capable of arousing or to its lack of intelligibility. 
In the latter case (by an inversion on this occasion of 
the attitude of contempt which was noted in pragmatic 
history) it is handed over to chronicle or romance. 
But in such dualism as this, and in the disagreement 
which persists owing to that dualism, lies the profound 
difference between the empirical and naturalistic con- 
ceptions of value, of institutions, and of societies, and 
the idealistic conception. This conception does not 
contemplate the establishment of an abstract history of 
the spirit, of the abstract universal, side by side with or 
beyond abstract individualistic or pragmatic history ; 
but the understanding that individual and idea, taken 
separately, are two equivalent abstractions, each equally 



THE HUMANITY OF HISTORY 107 

unfitted for supplying its subject to history, and that true 
history is the history of the individual in so far as he is 
universal and of the universal in so far as individual. 
It is not a question of abolishing Pericles to the advantage 
of politics, or Plato to the advantage of philosophy, 
or Sophocles to the advantage of tragedy ; but to think 
and to represent politics, philosophy, and tragedy as 
Pericles, Plato, and Sophocles, and these as each one of 
the others in one of their particular moments. Because 
if each one of these is the shadow of a dream outside its 
relation with the spirit, so likewise is the spirit outside 
its individualizations, and to attain to universality in the 
conception of history is to render both equally secure 
with that security which they mutually confer upon one 
another. Were the existence of Pericles, of Sophocles, 
and of Plato indifferent, would not the existence of the 
idea have for that very reason been pronounced indif- 
ferent ? Let him who cuts individuals out of history 
but pay close attention and he will perceive that either 
he has not cut them out at all, as he imagined, or he 
has cut out with them history itself. 



VII 

CHOICE AND PERIODIZATION 

SINCE a fact is historical in so far as it is thought, 
and since nothing exists outside thought, there 
can be no sense whatever in the question, What 
are historical facts and what are non-historical facts ? 
A non-historical fact would be a fact that has not been 
thought and would therefore be non-existent, and so 
far no one has yet met with a non-existent fact. A 
historical thought links itself to and follows another 
historical thought, and then another, and yet another ; 
and however far we navigate the great sea of being, we 
never leave the well-defined sea of thought. 

But it remains to be explained how the illusion is 
formed that there are two orders of facts, historical 
and non-historical. The explanation is easy when 
we recollect what has been said as to the chroniclizing 
of history which dies as history, leaving behind it the 
mute traces of its life, and also as to the function of 
erudition or philology, which preserves these traces for 
the ends of culture, arranging scattered items of news, 
documents, and monuments in an orderly manner. 
News, documents, and monuments are innumerable, 
and to collect them all would not only be impossible, 
but contrary to the ends themselves of culture, which, 
though aided in its work by the moderate and even 
copious supply of such things, would be hindered and 
suffocated by their exuberance, not to say infinity. 
We consequently observe that the annotator of news 
transcribes some items and omits the rest; the collector 
io8 



CHOICE AND PERIODIZATION 109 

of papers arranges and ties up in a bundle a certain 
number of them, tearing up or burning or sending to 
the dealer in such things a very large quantity, wbi-h 
forms the majority ; the collector of antiques places 
some objects in glass cases, others in temporary safe 
custody, others he resolutely destroys or allows to be 
destroyed ; if he does otherwise, he is not an intelligent 
collector, but a maniacal amasser, well fitted to provide 
(as he has provided) the comic type of the antiquarian 
for fiction and comedy. For this reason, not only are 
papers jealously collected and preserved in public 
archives, and lists made of them, but efforts are also made 
to discard those that are useless. It is for this reason 
that in the recensions of philologists we always hear 
the same song in praise of the learned man who has 
made a ' sober ' use of documents, of blame for him who 
has followed a different method and included what is 
vain and superfluous in his volumes of annals, of selec- 
tions from archives, or of collections of documents. All 
learned men and philologists, in fact, select^ and all are 
advised to select. And what is the logical criterion of 
this selection } There is none : no logical criterion 
can be named that shall determine what news or what 
documents are or are not useful and important, just 
because we are here occupied with a practical and not 
with a scientific problem. Indeed, this lack of a logical 
criterion is the foundation of the sophism that tyrannizes 
over maniacal collectors, who reasonably affirm that 
everything can be of use, and would therefore unreason- 
ably preserve everything — they wear themselves out in 
accumulating old clothes and odds and ends of all sorts, 
over which they mount guard with jealous affection. 
The criterion is the choice itself, conditioned, like every 
economic act, by knowledge of the actual situation, and 



no THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

in this case by the practical and scientific needs of a 
definite moment or epoch. This selection is certainly 
conducted with intelligence, but not with the application 
of a philosophic criterion, and is justified only in and 
by itself. For this reason we speak of the fine tact, 
or scent, or instinct of the collector or learned man. 
Such a process of selection may quite well make use of 
apparent logical distinctions, as those between public 
and private facts, capital and secondary documents, 
beautiful or ugly, significant or insignificant monuments ; 
but in final analysis the decision is always given from 
practical motives, and is summed up in the act of pre- 
serving or neglecting. Now from this preserving or 
neglecting, in which our action is realized, is afterward 
invented an objective quality, attributed to facts, which 
leads to their being spoken of as * facts that are worthy ' 
and * facts that are not worthy of history,' of * historical ' 
and ' non-historical ' facts. But all this is an affair of 
imagination, of vocabulary, and of rhetoric, which in no 
way changes the substance of things. 

When history is confounded with erudition and the 
methods of the one are unduly transferred to the other, 
and when the metaphorical distinction that has just 
been noted is taken in a literal sense, we are asked 
how it is possible to avoid going astray in the infinity 
of facts, and with what criterion it is possible to effect 
the separation of * historical ' facts from ' those that 
are not worthy of history.' But there is no fear of 
going astray in history, because, as we have seen, the 
problem is in every case prepared by life, and in every 
case the problem is solved by thought, which passes 
from the confusion of life to the distinctness of con- 
sciousness; a given problem with a given solution : a 
problem that generates other problems, but is never 



CHOICE AND PERIODIZATION iii 

a problem of choice between two or more facts, but on 
each occasion a creation of the unique fact, the fact 
thought. Choice does not appear in it, any more than 
in art, which passes from the obscurity of sentiment to 
the clearness of the representation, and is never embar- 
rassed between the images to be chosen, because itself 
creates the image, the unity of the image. 

By thus confounding two things, not only is an 
insoluble problem created, but the very distinction 
between facts that can and facts that cannot be neglected 
is also denaturalized and rendered void. This dis- 
tinction is quite valid as regards erudition, for facts 
that can be neglected are always facts — that is to say, 
they are traces of facts, in the form of news, documents, 
and monuments, and for this reason one can understand 
how they can be looked upon as a class to be placed 
side by side with the other class of facts that cannot 
be neglected. But non-historical facts — that is to say, 
facts that have not been thought — would be nothing, 
and when placed beside historical facts — ^that is to say, 
thought as a species of the same genus — they would 
communicate their nullity to those also, and would dis- 
solve their own distinctness, together with the concept 
of history. 

After this, it does not seem necessary to examine the 
characteristics that have been proposed as the basis for 
this division of facts into historical and non-historical. 
The assumption being false, the manner in which it is 
treated in its particulars remains indifferent and without 
importance in respect to the fundamental criticism of 
the division itself. It may happen (and this is usually 
the case) that the characteristics and the differences 
enunciated have some truth in themselves, or at least 
offer some problem for solution : for example, when by 



112 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

historical facts are meant general facts and by non- 
historical facts those that are individual. Here we find 
the problem of the relation of the individual and the 
universal. Or, again, by historical facts are sometimes 
meant those that treat of history proper, and by non- 
historical the stray references of chronicles, and here 
we find the problem as to the relation between history 
and chronicle. But regarded as an attempt to decide 
logically of what facts history should treat and what 
neglect, and to assign to each its quality, such divisions 
are all equally erroneous. 

The periodization of history is subject to the same 
criticism. To think history is certainly to divide it into 
periods, because thought is organism, dialectic, drama, 
and as such has its periods, its beginning, its middle, 
and its end, and all the other ideal pauses that a drama 
implies and demands. But those pauses are ideal and 
therefore inseparable from thought, with which they are 
one, as the shadow is one with the body, silence with 
sound : they are identical and changeable with it. 
Christian thinkers divided history into that which pre- 
ceded and that which followed the redemption, and 
this periodization was not an addition to Christian 
thought, but Christian thought itself. We modern 
Europeans divide it into antiquity, the Middle Ages, 
and modern times. This periodization has been subject 
to a great deal of refined criticism on the part of those 
who hold that it came to be introduced anyhow, almost 
dishonestly, without the authority of great names, and 
without the advice of the philosophers and the method- 
ologists being asked on the matter. But it has main- 
tained itself and will maintain itself so long as our 
consciousness shall persist in its present phase. The 
fact of its having been insensibly formed would appear 



CHOICE AND PERIODIZATION 113 

to be rather a merit than a demerit, because this means 
that it was not due to the caprice of an individual, but 
has followed the development of modern consciousness 
itself. When antiquity has nothing more to tell us 
who still feel the need of studying Greek and Latin, 
Greek philosophy and Roman law; when the Middle 
Ages have been superseded (and they have not been 
superseded yet) ; when a new social form, different 
from that which emerged from the ruins of the Middle 
Ages, has supplanted our own ; then the problem itself 
and the historical outlook which derives from it will 
also be changed, and perhaps antiquity and the Middle 
Ages and modern times will all be contained within a 
single epoch, and the pauses be otherwise distributed. 
And what has been said of these great periods is to be 
understood of all the others, which vary according to 
the variety of historical material and the various modes 
of viewing it. It has sometimes been said that every 
periodization has a * relative * value. But we must say 
' both relative and absolute,' like all thought, it being 
understood that the periodization is intrinsic to thought 
and determined by the determination of thought. 

However, the practical needs of chroniclism and of 
learning make themselves felt here also. Just as in 
metrical treatises the internal rhythm of a poem is re- 
solved into external rhythm and divided into syllables 
and feet, into long and short vowels, tonic and rhythmic 
accents, into strophes and series of strophes, and so 
on, so the internal time of historical thought (that 
time which is thought itself) is derived from chroni- 
clism converted into external time, or temporal series, 
of which the elements are spatially separated from one 
another. Scheme and facts are no longer one, but 
two, and the facts are disposed according to the scheme. 



114 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

and divided according to the scheme into major and minor 
cycles (for example, according to hours, days, months, 
years, centuries, and millenniums, where the calculation 
is based upon the rotations and revolutions of the earth 
upon itself and round the sun). Such is chronology^ by 
means of which we know that the histories of Sparta, 
Athens, and Rome filled the thousand years preceding 
Christ, that of the Lombards, the Visigoths, and the 
Franks the first millennium after Christ, and that we 
are still in the second millennium. This mode of 
chronology can be pursued by means of particularizing 
incidents thus : that the Empire of the West ended 
in A.D. 476 (although it did not really end then or 
had already ended previously) ; that Charlemagne the 
Frank was crowned Emperor at Rome by Pope Leo III 
in the year 800; that America was discovered in 1492, 
and that the Thirty Years War ended in 1648. It 
is of the greatest use to us to know these things, or 
(since we really know nothing in this way) to acquire 
the capacity of so checking references to facts that 
we are able to find them easily and promptly when 
occasion arises. Certainly no one thinks of speaking 
ill of chronologies and chronographies and tables and 
synoptic views of history, although in using them we 
run the risk (and in what thing done by man does 
he not run a risk.?) of seeing worthy folk impressed 
with the belief that the number produces the event, 
as the hand of the clock, when it touches the sign 
of the hour, makes the clock strike; or (as an old 
professor of mine used to say) that the curtain fell 
upon the acting of ancient history in 476, to rise 
again immediately afterward on the beginning of the 
Middle Ages. 

But such fancies are not limited to the minds of the 



CHOICE AND PERIODIZATION 115 

ingenuous and inattentive; they constitute the base of 
that error owing to which a distinction of periods, 
which shall be what is called objective and natural^ is 
desired and sought after. Christian chronographers had 
already introduced this ontological meaning into chrono- 
logy, making the millenniums of the world's history 
correspond with the days of the creation or the ages 
of man's life. Finally, Ferrari in Italy and Lorenz in 
Germany (the latter ignorant of his Italian predecessor) 
conceived a theory of historical periods according to 
generations, calculated in periods of thirty-one years 
and a fraction, or of thirty-three years and a fraction, 
and grouped as tetrads or triads, in periods of a 
hundred and twenty-five years or a century. But, 
without dwelling upon numerical and chronographic 
schemes, all doctrines that represent the history of 
nations as proceeding according to the stages of 
development of the individual, of his psychological de- 
velopment, of the categories of the spirit, or of anything 
else, are due to the same error, which is that of rendering 
periodization external and natural. All are mythological, 
if taken in the naturalistic sense, save when these 
designations are employed empirically — that is to say, 
when chronology is used in chroniclism and erudition 
in a legitimate manner. We must also repeat a warning 
as to the care to be employed in recognizing important 
problems, which sometimes have first appeared through 
the medium of those erroneous inquiries, and as to the 
truths that have been seen or caught a glimpse of by 
these means. This exempts us (as we remarked above 
in relation to the criteria of choice) from examining 
those doctrines in the particularity of their various de- 
terminations, because in this respect, if their assumption 
be obviously fantastic, their value is consequently nil. 



ii6 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

iW/j as the value of all those aesthetic constructions is 
nil which claim to pass from the abstractions, by means 
of which they reduce the organism of the work of art 
to fragments for practical ends, to the explanation of 
the nature of art and to the judgment and history of 
the creations of human imagination. 



VIII 

DISTINCTION (SPECIAL HISTORIES) 
AND DIVISION 

THE conception of history that we have reached — 
namely, that which has not its documents out- 
side itself, but in itself, which has not its final and 
causal explanation outside itself, but within itself, which 
has not philosophy outside itself, but coincides with 
philosophy, which has not the reason for its definite 
form and rhythm outside itself, but within itself — 
identifies history with the act of thought itself, which is 
always philosophy and history together. And with this 
it debarrasses it of the props and plasters applied to it 
as though to an invalid in need of external assistance. 
For they really did produce an infirmity through their 
very insistence in first imagining and then treating a 
non-existent infirmity. 

Doubtless the autonomy thus attained is a great 
advantage ; but at first sight it is not free from a grave 
objection. When all the fallacious distinctions formerly 
believed in have been cancelled, it seems that nothing 
remains for history as an act of thought but the imme- 
diate consciousness of the individual-universal, in which 
all distinctions are submerged and lost. And this is 
mysticism, which is admirably adapted for feeling one- 
self at unity with God, but is not adapted for thinking 
the world nor for acting in the world. 

Nor does it seem useful to add that unity with God 
does not exclude consciousness of diversity, of change, 
of becoming. For it can be objected that consciousness 

117 



ii8 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

of diversity either derives from the individual and 
intuitive element, and in this case it is incomprehensible 
how such an element can subsist in its proper form of 
intuition, in thought, which always universalizes; or if 
it is said to be the result of the act of thought itself, 
then the distinction, believed to have been abolished, 
reappears in a strengthened form, and the asserted 
indistinct simplicity of thought remains shaken. A 
mysticism which should insist upon particularity and 
diversity, a historical mysticism, in fact, would be a con- 
tradiction in terms, for mysticism is unhistorical and 
anti-historical by its very nature. 

But these objections retain their validity precisely 
when the act of thought is conceived in the mystical 
manner — that is to say, not as an act of thought, but as 
something negative, the simple result of the negation 
by reason of empirical distinctions, which certainly 
leaves thought free of illusions, but not yet truly full 
of itself. To sum up, mysticism, which is a violent 
reaction from naturalism and transcendency, yet retains 
traces of what it has denied, because it is incapable of 
substituting anything for it, and thus maintains its 
presence, in however negative a manner. But the really 
efficacious negation of empiricism and transcendency, 
their positive negation, is brought about not by means 
of mysticism, but of idealism ; not in the immediate, but 
in the mediated consciousness; not in indistinct unity, 
but in the unity that is distinction, and as such truly 
thought. 

The act of thought is the consciousness of the spirit 
that is consciousness; and therefore that act is auto- 
consciousness. And auto-consciousness implies distinc- 
tion in unity, distinction between subject and object, 
theory and practice, thought and will, universal and 



DISTINCTION AND DIVISION 119 

particular, imagination and intellect, utility and morality, 
or however these distinctions of and in unity are 
formulated, and whatever may be the historical forms 
and denominations which the eternal system of dis- 
tinctions, perennis philosophia, may assume. To think is 
to judge, and to judge is to distinguish while unifying, 
in which the distinguishing is not less real than the 
unifying, and the unifying than the distinguishing — 
that is to say, they are real, not as two diverse realities, 
but as one reality, which is dialectical unity (whether 
it be called unity or distinction). 

The first consequence to be drawn from this con- 
ception of the spirit and of thought is that when 
empirical distinctions have been overthrown history 
does not fall into the indistinct ; when the will-o'-the- 
wisps have been extinguished, darkness does not 
supervene, because the light of the distinction is to be 
found in history itself. History is thought by judging 
it, with that judgment which is not, as we have shown, 
the evaluation of sentiments, but the intrinsic knowledge 
of facts. And here its unity with philosophy is all the 
more evident, because the better philosophy penetrates 
and refines its distinctions, the better it penetrates the 
particular ; and the closer its embrace of the particular, 
the closer its possession of its own proper conceptions. 
Philosophy and historiography progress together, in- 
dissolubly united. 

Another consequence to be deduced from the above, 
and one which will perhaps seem to be more clearly 
connected with the practice of historiography, is the 
refutation of the false idea of a general history, superior 
to special histories. This has been called a history of 
histories, and is supposed to be true and proper history, 
having beneath it political, economic, and institutional 



I20 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

histories, moral history or the history of the sentiments 
and ethical ideals, the history of poetry and art, the 
history of thought and of philosophy. But were this so, 
a dualism would arise, with the usual result of every 
dualism, that each one of the two terms, having been ill 
distinguished, reveals itself as empty. In this case, either 
general history shows itself to be empty, having nothing 
to do when the special histories have accomplished their 
work, or particular histories do so, when they fail even 
to pick up the crumbs of the banquet, all of which has 
been voraciously devoured by the other. Sometimes 
recourse is had to a feeble expedient, and to general 
history is accorded the treatment of one of the subjects 
of the special histories, the latter being then grouped 
apart from that. Of this arrangement the best that 
can be said is that it is purely verbal and does not designate 
a logical distinction and opposition, and the worst that 
can happen is that a real value should be attributed to 
it, because in this case a fantastic hierarchy is established, 
which makes it impossible to understand the genuine 
development of the facts. And there is practically no 
special history that has not been promoted to be a 
general history, now as political or social history, to 
which those of literature, art, philosophy, religion, 
and the lesser sides of life should supply an appendix ; 
now as history of the ideas or progress of the mind, where 
social history and all the others are placed in the second 
line ; now as economic history, where all the others are 
looked upon as histories or chronicles of ' superstruc- 
tures ' derived from economic development in an 
illusory manner, while the former is held to have 
developed in some mysterious way by means of unknown 
powers, without thought and will, or producing thought 
and will, in fancies and velleities, like so many bubbles 



DISTINCTION AND DIVISION 121 

on the surface of its course. We must be firm in 
maintaining against the theory of general history that 
there does not exist anything real but special histories^ 
because thought thinks facts to the extent that it discerns 
a special aspect of them, and only and always constructs 
histories of ideas, of imaginations, of political actions, 
of apostolates, and the like. 

But it is equally just and advantageous to maintain 
the opposite thesis : that nothing exists but general history. 
In this way is refuted the false notion of the speciality 
of histories, understood as a juxtaposition of specialities. 
This fallacy is correctly noted by the critics in all histories 
which expose the various orders of facts one after the 
other as so many strata and (to employ the critics' word) 
compartments or little boxes, containing political history, 
industrial and commercial history, history of customs, 
religious history, history of literature and of art, and so 
on, under so many separate headings. These divisions 
are merely literary; they may possess some utility as 
such, but in the case under consideration they do not 
fulfil merely a literary function, but attempt that of 
historical understanding, and thereby give evidence of 
their defect, in thus presenting these histories as without 
relation between one another, not dialecticized, but 
aggregated. It is quite clear that history remains to be 
written after the writing of those histories in this dis- 
jointed manner. Abstract distinction and abstract unity 
are both equally misunderstandings of concrete distinc- 
tion and concrete unity, which is relation. 

And when the relation is not broken and history is 
thought in the concrete, it is seen that to think one aspect 
is to think all the others at the same time. Thus it is 
impossible to understand completely the doctrine, say, 
of a philosopher, without having to some extent recourse 



122 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

to the personality of the man himself, and, by distin- 
guishing the philosopher from the man, at the same time 
qualifying not only the philosopher but the man, and 
uniting these two distinct characteristics as a relation of 
life and philosophy. The same is to be said of the 
distinction between the philosopher as philosopher and as 
orator or artist, as subject to his private passions or as 
rising to the execution of his duty, and so on. This 
means that we cannot think the history of philosophy 
save as at the same time social, political, literary, religious, 
and ethical history, and so on. This is the source of 
the illusion that one in particular of these histories is 
the whole of them, or that that one from which a start 
is made, and which answers to the predilections and to 
the competence of the writer, is the foundation of all 
the others. It also explains why it is sometimes said 
that the * history of philosophy ' is also the * philosophy 
of history,' or that * social history ' is the true * history 
of philosophy,' and so on. A history of philosophy 
thoroughly thought out is truly the whole of history (and 
in like manner a history of literature or of any other form 
of the spirit), not because it annuls the other in itself, 
but because all the others are present in it. Hence 
the demand that historians shall acquire universal 
minds and a doctrine that shall also be in a way universal, 
and the hatred of specialist historians, pure philosophers, 
pure men of letters, pure politicians, or pure econo- 
mists, who, owing precisely to their one-sidedness, 
fail even to understand the speciality that they claim to 
know in its purity, but possess only in skeleton form — 
that is to say, in its abstractness. 

And here a distinction becomes clear to us, with which 
it is impossible to dispense in thinking history: the 
distinction between form and matter^ owing to which. 



DISTINCTION AND DIVISION 123 

for example, we understand art by referring it to matter 
(emotions, sentiments, passions, etc.) to which the artist 
has given form ; or philosophy by referring it to the 
facts which gave rise to the problems that the thinker 
formulated and solved ; or the action of the politician 
by referring it to the aspirations and ideas with which 
he was faced, and which supplied the material he has 
shaped with genius, as an artist of practical life — that 
is to say, we understand these things by always dis- 
tinguishing an external from an internal history, or an 
external history that is made into an internal history. 
This distinction of matter and form, of external and 
internal, would give rise again to the worst sort of 
dualism, would lead us to think of the pragmatical 
imagination of man who strives against his enemy 
nature, if it did not assume an altogether internal and 
dialectical meaning in its true conception. Because 
from what has been said it is easy to see that external 
and internal are not two realities or two forms of reality, 
but that external and internal, matter and form, both 
appear in turn as form in respect to one another ; and 
this materialization of each to idealize itself in the other 
is the perpetual movement of the spirit as relation and 
circle : a circle that is progress just because neither 
of these forms has the privilege of functioning solely 
as form, and neither has the misfortune of functioning 
solely as matter. What is the matter of artistic and 
philosophical history } What is called social and moral 
history } And what is the matter of this history } 
Artistic and philosophical history. From this clearing 
up of the relation between matter and form, that false 
mode of history is refuted which sets facts on one side 
and ideas on the other, as two rival elements, and is 
therefore never able to pay its debt and show how ideas 



124 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

are generated from facts and facts from ideas, because 
that generation must be conceived in its truth as a per- 
petually rendering vain of one of the elements in the 
unity of the other. 

If history is based upon distinction (unity) and 
coincides with philosophy, the high importance that 
research into the autonomy of one or the other special 
history attains in historiographical development is per- 
fectly comprehensible, but this is merely the reflection 
of philosophical research, and is often troubled and 
lacking in precision. All know what a powerful stimulus 
the new conception of imagination and art gave to the 
conception of history, and therefore also to mythology 
and religion, which were being developed with slowness 
and difficulty during the eighteenth to triumph at the 
beginning of the nineteenth century. This is set down 
to the creation of the history of poetry and myth in 
the works of Vico in the first place and then of Herder 
and others, and of the history of the figurative arts in 
the works of Winckelmann and others. And to the 
clearer conception of philosophy, law, customs, and 
language is due their renewal in the respective historio- 
graphical fields, at the hands of Hegel, Savigny, and 
Humboldt, and other creators and improvers of history, 
celebrated on this account. This also explains why 
there has been so much dispute as to whether history 
should be described as history of the state or as history 
of culture, and as to whether the history of culture 
represents an original aspect beyond that of the state 
or greater than it, as to whether the progress narrated 
in history is only intellectual or also practical and 
moral, and so on. These discussions must be referred 
to the fundamental philosophical inquiry into the 
forms of the spirit, their distinction and relation, 



DISTINCTION AND DIVISION 125 

and to the precise mode of relation of each one to 
the other. ^ 

But although history distinguishes and unifies, it 
never divides — ^that is to say, separates \ and the divisions 
of history which have been and are made do not originate 
otherwise than as the result of the same practical and 
abstractive process that we have seen break up the 
actuality of living history to collect and arrange the inert 
materials in the temporal scheme, rendered extrinsic. 
Histories already produced, and as such past, receive 
in this way titles (every thought is * without title ' in 
its actuality — that is to say, it has only itself for title), 
and each one is separated from the other, and all of them, 
thus separated, are classified under more or less general 
empirical conceptions, by means of classifications that 
more or less cross one another. We may admire 
copious lists of this sort in the books of methodologists, 
all of them proceeding, as is inevitable, according to 
one or the other of these general criteria : the criterion 
of the quality of the objects (histories of religions, 
customs, ideas, institutions, etc., etc.), and that of 
temporal-spatial arrangement (European, Asiatic, Ameri- 
can, ancient, medieval, of modern times, of ancient 
Greece, of ancient Rome, of modern Greece, of the 
Rome of the Middle Ages, etc.); in conformity with 
the abstract procedure which, when dividing the con- 
cept, is led to posit on the one hand abstract forms of the 
spirit (objects) and on the other abstract intuitions (space 
and time). I shall not say that those titles and divisions 
are useless, nor even those tables, but shall limit myself 
to the remark that the history of philosophy, of art, or 
of any other ideally distinct history, when understood 
as a definite book or discourse, becomes empirical for 

^ See Appendix II. 



126 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

the reason already given, that true distinction is ideal, 
and a discourse or a book in its concreteness contains 
not only distinction but unity and totality, and to look 
upon either as incorporating only one side of the real 
is arbitrary. And I shall also observe that as there 
are histories of philosophy and of art in the empirical 
sense, so also nothing forbids our talking in the same 
sense of a general history, separate from special histories, 
indeed even of a history of progress and one of decadence, 
of good and evil, of truth and error. 

The confusion between division and distinction — that 
is to say, between the empirical consideration that breaks 
up history into special histories and the philosophical 
consideration which always unifies and distinguishes as 
it unifies — is the cause of errors analogous to those that 
we have seen to result from such a process. To this 
are due above all the many disquisitions on the * problem ' 
and on the * limits ' of this or that history or group of 
special histories empirically constituted. The problem 
does not exist, and the limits are impossible to assign 
because they are conventional, as is finally recognized 
with much trouble, and as could be recognized with 
much less trouble if a start were made, not from the 
periphery, but from the centre — that is to say, from 
gnoseological analysis. A graver error is the creation 
of an infinity of entia imaginationis, taken for metaphysical 
entities and forms of the spirit, and the pretension that 
arises from this of developing the history of abstractions 
as though they were so many forms of the spirit with 
independent lives of their own, whereas the spirit is 
one. Hence the innumerable otiose problems with 
fantastic solutions met with in historical books, which 
it is here unnecessary to record. Every one is now 
able to draw these obvious consequences for himself 



DISTINCTION AND DIVISION 127 

and to make appropriate reflections concerning them. 
It is further obvious that the entia imaginationis, in the 
same way as the ' choice * of facts, and the chronological 
schematization or dating of them, enter as a subsidiary 
element into any concrete exposition of historical thought, 
because the distinction of thinking and abstraction is 
an ideal distinction, which operates only in the unity 
of the spirit. 



IX 
THE ' HISTORY OF NATURE ' AND HISTORY 

WE must cease the process of classifying referred 
to just now, and also that of the illusion of 
naturalism connected with it, by means of which 
imaginary entities created by abstraction are changed 
into historical facts and classificatory schemes into 
history, if we wish to understand the difference between 
history that is history and that due to what are called 
the natural sciences. This is also called history — 
' history of nature ' — but is so only in name. 

Some few years ago a lively protest was made ^ against 
the confusion of these two forms of mental labour, 
one of which offers us genuine history, such as might, 
for instance, be that of the Peloponnesian War or of 
Hannibal's wars or of ancient Egyptian civilization, 
and the other a spurious history, such as that known 
as the history of animal organisms, of the earth's 
structure or geology, of the formation of the solar 
system or cosmogony. It was observed with reason that 
in many treatises the one has been wrongly connected 
with the other — ^that is to say, history of civilization 
with history of nature, as though the former follows the 
latter historically. The bottomless abyss between the 
two was pointed out. This has been observed, however, 
in a confused way by all, and better by historians of 
purely historical temperament, who have an instinctive 

1 By the economist Professor Gottl, at the seventh congress of German 
historians, held at Heidelberg. The lecture can be read in print under 
the anything but clear or exact title of Die Grenzen der Geschichte (Leipzig, 
Duncker u. Humblot, 1904). 

128 



HISTORY OF NATURE 129 

repugnance for natural history and hold themselves care- 
fully aloof from it. It was remembered with reason that 
the history of historians has always the individually deter- 
minate as its object, and proceeds by internal reconstruc- 
tion, whereas that of the naturalists depends upon types 
and abstractions and proceeds by analogies. Finally, 
this so-called history or quasi-history was very accurately 
defined as an apparently chronological arrangement of 
things spatially distinct, and it was proposed to describe 
it with a new and proper name, that of Metastoria. 

Indeed, constructions of this sort are really nothing 
but classificatory schemes, from the more simple to the 
more complex. Their terms are obtained by abstract 
analyses and generalization, and their series appears to 
the imagination as a history of the successive developmicnt 
of the more complex from the more simple. Their 
right to exist as classificatory schemes is incontestable, 
and their utility is also incontestable, for they avail 
themselves of imagination to assist learning and to aid 
the memory. 

This only becomes contestable when they are 
estranged from themselves, lose their real nature, lav 
claim to illegitimate functions, and take their imaginary 
historicity too seriously. We find this in the meta- 
physic of naturalism, especially in evolutionism, which 
has been its most recent form. This is due, not so 
much to the men of science (who are as a rule cautious 
and possess a more or less clear consciousness of the 
limits of those schemes and series) as to the dilettante 
scientists and dilettante philosophers to whom we owe 
the many books that undertake to narrate the origin 
of the world, and which, aided by the acrisia of their 
authors, run on without meeting any obstacle, from 
the cell, indeed from the nebula, to the French Revolu- 



I30 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

tion, and even to the socialist movements of the nine- 
teenth century. ' Universal histories,' and therefore 
cosmological romances (as we have already remarked 
in relation to universal histories), are composed, not of 
pure thought, which is criticism, but of thought mingled 
with imagination, which finds its outlet in myths. It 
is useless to prove in detail that the evolutionists of to-day 
are creators of myths, and that they weary themselves 
with attempts to write the first chapters of Genesis in 
modern style (their description is more elaborate, but 
they confuse such description with history in a manner 
by no means inferior to that of Babylonian or Israelitish 
priests), because this becomes evident as soon as such 
works are placed in their proper position. Their logical 
origin will at once make clear their true character. 

But setting aside these scientific monstrosities, already 
condemned by the constant attitude of restraint and 
scepsis toward them on the part of all scientifically 
trained minds — condemned, too, by the very fact that they 
have had to seek and have found their fortune at the 
hands of the crowd or ' great public,' and have fallen 
to the rank of popular propaganda — we must here 
determine more precisely how these classificatory schemes 
of historiographical appearance are formed and how they 
operate. With this object, it is well to observe that 
classificatory schemes and apparent histories do not 
appear to be confined to the field of what are called the 
natural sciences or sub-human world, but appear also in 
that of the moral sciences or sciences of the human world. 
And to adduce simple and perspicuous examples, it often 
happens that in the abstract analysis of language and the 
positing of the types of the parts of speech, noun, verb, 
adjective, pronoun, and so on, or in the analysis of the 
word into syllables and sounds, or of style into proper or 



HISTORY OF NATURE 131 

metaphorical words and into various classes of metaphors, 
we construct classes that go from the more simple to the 
more complex. This gives rise to the illusion of history 
of language, exposed as the successive acquisition of the 
various parts of speech or as the passage from the single 
sound to the syllable (monosyllabic languages), from the 
syllable to the aggregate of syllables (plurisyllabic lan- 
guages), from words to propositions, metres, rhymes, 
and so on. These are imaginary histories that have 
never been developed elsewhere than in the studies 
of scientists. In like manner, literary styles that have 
been abstractly distinguished and arranged in series of 
increasing complexity (for example, lyric, epic, drama) 
have given rise and continue to give rise to the thought 
of a schematic arrangement of poetry, which, for example, 
should appear during a first period as lyric, a second as 
epic, a third as drama. 

The same has happened with regard to the classifica- 
tions of abstract political, economic, philosophical forms, 
and so on, all of which have been followed by their 
shadows in the shape of imaginative history. The 
repugnance that historians experience in attaching their 
narratives to naturalistic-mythological prologues — that 
is to say, in linking together in matrimony a living being 
and a corpse — is also proved by their reluctance to admit 
scraps of abstract history into concrete history, for they 
at once reveal their heterogeneity in regard to one another 
by their mere appearance. De Sanctis has often been 
reproached for not having begun his History of Italian 
Literature with an account of the origins of the Italian 
language and of its relations with Latin, and even with 
the linguistic family of Indo-European languages, and 
of the races that inhabit the various parts of Italy. An 
attempt has even been made to correct the design of 



132 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

that classic work by supplying, with a complete lack 
of historical sense, the introductions and additions that 
are not needed. But de Sanctis, who took great pains 
to select the best point of departure for the narrative of 
the history of Italian literature, and finally decided to 
begin with a brief sketch of the state of culture at the 
Suabian court and of the Sicilian poetical school, did not 
hesitate a moment in rejecting all abstractions of lan- 
guages and races which to his true historical sense did 
not appear to be reconcilable with the tenzone of Ciullo, 
with the rhythms of Friar Jacob, or with the ballades of 
Guido Cavalcanti, which are quite concrete things. 

We must also remember that plans for classification 
and pseudo-historical arrangements of their analogies 
are created not only upon the bodies of histories that are 
living and really reproducible and rethinkable, but also 
upon those that are dead — that is to say, upon news 
items, documents, and monuments. This observation 
makes more complete the identification of imaginary 
histories arising from the natural sciences with those 
which have their source in the moral sciences. The 
foundation of both is therefore very often not historical 
intelligence, but, on the contrary, the lack of it, and 
their end not only that of aiding living history and 
keeping it alive, but also the mediate end of assisting 
in the prompt handling of the remains and the cinders 
of the vanished world, the inert residues of history. 

The efficacy of this enlargement of the concept of 
abstract history, which is analogical or naturalizing in 
respect to the field known as * spiritual ' (and thus 
separated from that empirically known as ' natural '), 
cannot be doubted by one who knows and remembers 
the great consequences that philosophy draws from the 
resolution of the realistic concept of ' nature ' in the 



HISTORY OF NATURE 133 

idealistic conception of ' construction,' which the human 
spirit makes of reality, looking upon it as nature. Kant 
worked upon the solution of this problem indefatigably 
and with subtlety ; he gave to it the direction that it 
has followed down to our own days. And the conse- 
quence that we draw from it, in respect to the problem 
that now occupies us, is that an error was committed 
when, moved by the legitimate desire of distinguishing 
abstract from concrete history, naturalizing history from 
thinking history, genuine from fictitious history, a sort 
of agnosticism was reached, as a final result, by means 
of limiting history to the field of humanity, which was 
said to be cognoscible, and declaring all the rest to be the 
object of metastoria and the limit of human knowledge. 
This conclusion would lead again to a sort of dualism, 
though in a lofty sphere. But if metastoria also appears, 
as we have seen, in the human field, it is clear that the 
distinction as formulated stands in need of correction ; 
arid the agnosticism founded upon it vacillates and falls. 
There is not a double object before thought, man and 
nature, the one capable of treatment in one way, the other 
in another way, the first cognizable, and the second 
uncognizable and capable only of being constructed 
abstractly ; but thought always thinks history, the his- 
tory of reality that is one, and beyond thought there is 
nothing, for the natural object becomes a myth when it 
is affirmed as object, and shows itself in its true reality 
as nothing else but the human spirit itself, which sche- 
matized history that has been lived and thought, or the 
materials of the history that has already been lived and 
thought. The saying that nature has no history is to be 
understood in the sense that nature as a rational being 
capable of thought has not history, because it is not — or, 
let us say, it is nothing that is real. The opposite saying, 



134 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

that nature is also formative and possesses historical life, 
is to be taken in the other sense that reality, the sole 
reality (comprehending man and nature in itself, which are 
only empirically and abstractly separate), is all develop- 
ment and life. 

What substantial difference can ever be discovered 
on the one hand between geological stratifications and 
the remains of vegetables and animals, of which it is 
possible to construct a prospective and indeed a serial 
arrangement, but which it is never possible to rethink 
in the living dialectic of their genesis, and on the other 
hand the relics of what is called human history, and not 
only that called prehistorical, but even the historical 
documents of our history of yesterday, which we have 
forgotten and no longer understand, and which we can 
certainly classify and arrange in a series, and build 
castles in the air about or allow our fancies to wander 
among, but which it is no longer possible really to think 
again ? Both cases, which have been arbitrarily dis- 
tinguished, are reducible to one single case. Even in 
what is called * human history ' there exists a * natural 
history,' and what is called * natural history * also was 
once ' human ' history — that is to say, spiritual, although 
to us who have left it so far behind it seems to be 
almost foreign, so mummified and mechanicized has it 
become, if we glance at it but summarily and from the 
outside. Do you wish to understand the true history of 
a Ligurian or Sicilian neolithic man ? First of all, try if 
it be possible to make yourself mentally into a Ligurian 
or Sicilian neolithic man; and if it be not possible, or 
you do not care to do this, content yourself with de- 
scribing and classifying and arranging in a series the 
skulls, the utensils, and the inscriptions belonging to 
those neolithic peoples. Do you wish to understand 



HISTORY OF NATURE 135 

the history of a blade of grass ? First and foremost, 
try to make yourself into a blade of grass, and if you do 
not succeed, content yourself with analysing the parts 
and even with disposing them in a kind of imaginative 
history. This leads to the idea from which I started 
in making these observations about historiography, as 
to history being contemporary history and chronicle being 
past history. We take advantage of the idea and at the 
same time confirm that truth by solving with its aid the 
antithesis between a history that is * history ' and a 
* history of nature,' which, although it is history, was 
supposed to obey laws strangely at variance with those 
of the only history. It solves this antithesis by placing 
the second in the lower rank oi pseudo-history. 



APPENDIX I 
ATTESTED EVIDENCE 

IF true history is that of which an interior verifica- 
tion is possible, and is therefore history ideally con- 
temporary and present, and if history by witnesses 
is lacking in truth and is not even false, but just neither 
false nor true (not a hoc est but a fertur)^ a legitimate 
question arises as to the origin and function of those 
innumerable propositions resumed from evidence criti- 
cally thrashed out and * held to be true,' although not 
verified, and perhaps never to be verified, but neverthe- 
less employed even in most serious historical treatment. 
When we are writing the history of the doctrine 
known as the coincidentia oppositorum^ or of the poem 
called / sepolcri^ the Latin of the Cardinal di Cusa 
and the verse of Foscolo obviously belong to us, both 
as to the thoughts and the actual words, pronounced 
by ourselves to ourselves, and the certainty of those 
historical facts is at the same time logical truth. But 
that the De docta ignorantia was written between the end 
of 1439 and the early part of 1440, and Foscolo's poem 
on the return of the poet to Italy after his long military 
service in France, is evidence founded upon proofs, as 
to which we can only say that they are to be considered 
valid, because they have been to some extent attested^ 
but we cannot claim them to be true. No amount of 
acute mental labour upon them can prevent another 
document or the better reading of an old document 
destroying them. Nevertheless, no one will treat of 
the works of the Cusan or of Foscolo without availing 
136 



ATTESTED EVIDENCE 137 

himself of the biographical details as to their authors 
which have been preserved. 

An esteemed methodologist of our day has been 
tempted to found the faith placed in this order of evi- 
dence upon a sort of telepathy of the past, an almost 
spiritualistic revival. But there is nothing so mysteri- 
ous in the genesis of that belief as to need a risky and 
fantastic explanation, to which even Horace's Jew would 
not give credence. On the contrary, it is a question 
of something that we can observe in process of forma- 
tion in our private life of every day. We are noting down 
in our diary, for instance, certain of our acts, or striking 
the balance of our account. After a certain interval 
has elapsed those facts fade from memory and the only 
way of affirming to ourselves that they have happened 
and must be considered true is the evidence of our 
notes : the document bears witness ; trust the book. 
We behave in a similar way in respect to the statements 
of others on the authority of their diaries or account- 
books. We presume that if the thing has been written 
down it answers to the truth. Doubtless this assump- 
tion, like every assumption, may turn out to be false in 
fact, owing to the note having been made in a mom.ent 
of distraction or of hallucination, or too late, when the 
memory of the fact was already imprecise and lacking 
in certainty, or because it was capriciously made or made 
with the object of deceiving others. But just for this 
reason, written evidence is not usually accepted with 
closed eyes ; its verisimilitude is examined and we 
confront it with other written evidence, we investigate 
the probity and accuracy of the writer or witness. It 
is just for this reason that the penal code threatens 
with pains and penalties those who alter or falsify 
documents. And although these and other subtle and 



138 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

severe precautions do not in certain cases prevent fraud, 
deception, and error (in the same way that the tribunals 
established for the purpose of condemning the guilty 
often send away the guilty unpunished and sometimes 
condemn the innocent), yet the use of documents and 
evidence works out on the whole in accordance with 
the truth ; it is held to be useful and worthy of 
support and encouragement, because the injuries that 
it is liable to cause are greatly inferior to those that 
it prevents. 

Now what men do with regard to their private affairs 
in daily life may be said to be done on a large scale by 
the human race when it delivers itself of the load 
of innumerable facts and fixes them externally where 
they are recoverable in a weakened form as unverifiable 
documentary evidence, yet are nevertheless such that 
as a whole we are justified in looking upon them and 
treating them as true. Historical faith then is not 
the result of telepathy or spiritualism, but of a wise 
economic provision, which the spirit continues to realize. 
In this way we understand historical work directed 
toward the prevention of alterations and deformations, 
and its acceptation of certain testimony, as * what must 
be held to be true in the present state of science,' and 
its graduation of the rest as uncertain, probable, and 
most probable to be sometimes accepted in the expec- 
tation of ulterior inquiries. Finally, it explains the 
dislike of * hypercriticism * when, not content with a 
constant refinement of criticism, hypercriticism contests 
the value of the most ingenuous and authoritative 
testimony. The reason is that it thus breaks the rules 
of the game that is being played sub regula, and only 
serves at the most to remind those apt to forget it 
that history by evidence is at bottom an altogether 



ATTESTED EVIDENCE 139 

external history, never fundamental, true history, which 
is contemporary and present. 

This genesis or nature of * attested ' evidence already 
contains the answer to the other question as to its 
function. It is clear that this cannot be to posit true 
history or to take its place, but to supply it with those 
secondary particulars which it would not be worth while 
to make the effort of keeping alive and complete in 
the mind, for this effort would result in damaging what 
is most important to us. ' Finally, whether the De 
docta ignorantia were written some time earlier or later 
is something that may quite well be determined by a 
different interpretation of this or that thought of Cusanus, 
but it does not affect the function that the doctrine of 
the coincidence of opposites exercises in the formation 
of logical science. Again, whether the Sepolcri was com- 
posed or planned prior to Foscolo's visit to France would 
without doubt change to some extent our representation 
of the gradual development of the soul and genius of the 
poet, but it would hardly at all change our mode of in- 
terpreting his great ode. Those who despair of historical 
truth, owing to the lack of a verifiable certainty of some 
particulars, or to the uncertainty and dubiety that 
surrounds it, resemble him who, having forgotten the 
chronicle of his life in this or that year, should think that 
he did not know himself in his present condition, which 
is both the recapitulation of his past and carries with 
it his past in all that it really concerns him to know. 
But, on the other hand, attested evidence that has been 
held to be true is a stimulus to us to search ourselves 
more closely, an enrichment of what we have found by 
means of analysis and meditation and a confirmation or 
proof of our thoughts, which are not to be neglected, 
especially when true evidence and attested evidence 



I40 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

agree with one another. To refuse the assistance and 
the facilities afforded by attested evidence, owing to the 
fear that some of it may prove false, or because all of it 
possesses an external and somewhat general and vague 
character, would be to refuse the authority of the human 
race^ and so to commit the sin of Descartes and of 
Malebranche. This great refusal does not concern or 
assist the understanding of history. All that does 
matter and does assist is that authority — including the 
authority of the human race — should never be allowed 
to take the place of the thought of humanity^ to which, 
in any case, belongs the first place. 



APPENDIX II 

ANALOGY AND ANOMALY OF SPECIAL 
HISTORIES 

IN the course of the preceding theoretical explana- 
tions we have denied both the idea of a universal 
history (in time and space) * and that of a general 
history (of the spirit in its indiscriminate generality or 
unity),^ and have insisted instead upon the opposite 
view with its two clauses : that history is always particular 
and always special, and that these two determinations 
constitute precisely concrete and effective universality and 
concrete and effective unity. What has been declared 
impossible, then, does not represent in any way a loss, 
for it is on the one hand fictitious universality or the 
universality of fancy, and on the other abstract univer- 
sality, or, if it be preferred, confused universality. So- 
called universal histories have therefore shown themselves 
to be particular histories, which have assumed that title 
for purposes of literary notoriety, or as collections, views, 
and chroniclistical compilations of particular histories, or, 
finally, as romances. In like manner, general inclusive 
histories are either so only in name, or set different 
histories side by side, or they are metaphysical and 
metaphorical playthings. 

As a result of this double but converging negation, 
it is also advisable to refute a common and deeply rooted 
belief (which we ourselves at one time shared to some 
extent)^ that we should arrive at the re-establishment 
of the universality of the fancy: or that there are some 

^ Supra, pp. 55-59. ^ Supra, pp. 1 19-122. ^ In the Esthetic, I, ch. xvii. 

141 



142 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

among the special histories, constituted according to the 
various forms of the spirit (general and individual only 
in so far as every form of the spirit is the whole spirit 
in that form), which require universal treatment and 
others only treatment as monographs. The typical 
instance generally adduced is that of the difference 
between the history of philosophy and the history of 
poetry or of art. The subject of the former is supposed 
to be the one great philosophical problem that interests 
all men, of the latter the sentimental or imaginative 
problems of particular moments, or at the most of 
particular artists. Thus the former is supposed to be 
continuous, the latter discontinuous, the former capable 
of complete universal vision, the second only of a 
sequence of particular visions. But a more * realistic ' 
conception of philosophy deprives it of this privilege 
as compared with the history of art and poetry or of f 
any other special history ; for, appearances notwith- 
standing, it is not true that men have concentrated upon 
one philosophical problem only, whose successive solu- 
tions, less and less inadequate, compose a single line, 
of progress, the universal history of the human spirit, 
affording support and unification to all other histories. 
The opposite is the truth : the philosophical problems 
that men have treated of and will treat of are infinite, 
and each one of them is always particularly and indivi- 
dually determined. The illusion as to the uniqueness of 
the problem is due to logical misapprehension, increased 
by historical contingencies, whence a problem which 
owing to religious motives seemed supreme has been 
looked upon as unique or fundamental, and groupings 
and generalizations made for practical ends have been 
held to be real identity and unity. ^ * Universal * 

1 See Appendix III. 



SPECIAL HISTORIES 143 

histories of philosophy, too, like the others, when we 
examine them with a good magnifying glass, are revealed 
as either particular histories of the problem that engages 
the philosopher-historian, or arbitrary artificial con- 
structions, or tables and collections of many different 
historical sequences, in the manner of a manual or 
encyclopaedia of philosophical history. Certainly nothing 
forbids the composition of abridgments of philosophical 
histories, containing classifications of particular problems 
and representing the principal thinkers of all peoples 
and of all times as occupied with one or another class of 
problem. This, however, is always a chroniclistical and 
naturalistic method of treating the history of philosophy, 
which only really lives when a new thinker connects 
the problems already set in the past and its intrinsic 
antecedents with the definite problem that occupies 
his attention. He provisionally sets aside others with 
a different connexion, though without for that reason 
suppressing them, intending rather to recall them 
when another problem makes their presence necessary. 
It is for this reason that even in those abridgments 
that seem to be the most complete and * objective ' 
(that is to say, * material ') a certain selection does 
appear, due to the theoretical interest of the writer, 
who never altogether ceases to be a historiographer- 
philosopher. The procedure is in fact just that of the 
history of art and poetry, where what is really historical 
treatment, living and complete, is the thought or criti- 
cism of individual poetical personalities, and the rest a 
table of criticisms, an abridgment due to contiguity of 
time or place, affinity of matter or similarity of tempera- 
ment, or to degrees of artistic excellence. Nor must 
we say that every philosophic problem is linked to all 
the others and is always a problem of the whole of 



144 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

philosophy, thus differing from the cases of poetry and 
art, for there is no diversity here either, and the whole 
of history and the entire universe are immanent in every 
single work of art. 

Now that we have likewise reduced philosophies of 
history to the rank of particular histories, it is scarcely 
necessary to demonstrate that the demand being made 
in several quarters for a ' universal ' or * general * 
history of science is without foundation. For such a 
history would be impossible to write, even if we were 
able to identify or compare the history of science with 
that of philosophy. But it is doubly impossible both 
because there are comprised under the name of ' science ■' 
such diverse forms as sciences of observation and 
mathematical sciences, and also because in each of 
these classes themselves the several disciplines remain 
separate, owing to the irreducible variety of data and 
postulates from which they spring. If, as we have 
pointed out, every particular philosophical problem 
links and places itself in harmony with all other philo- 
sophical problems, every scientific problem tends, on 
the contrary, to shut itself up in itself, and there is no 
more destructive tendency in science than that of 
' explaining ' all the facts by means of a ' single principle,' 
substituting, that is to say, an unfruitful metaphysic 
for fruitful science, allowing an empty word to act 
as a magic wand, and by * explaining everything ' to 
* explain ' nothing at all. The unity admitted by the 
history of the sciences is not that which connects one 
theory with another and one science with another in 
an imaginary general history of science, but that which 
connects each science and each theory with the intel- 
lectual and social complex of the moment in which it 
appeared. But even here too we must utter the warning 



SPECIAL HISTORIES 145 

that in thus explaining their true nature we do not wish 
to contest the right to existence of tables and encyclo- 
paedias of the history of science, far less to throw 
discredit upon the present direction of studies, by means 
of which, at the call of the history of the sciences, useful 
research is stimulated in directions that have been long 
neglected. Nor do we intend to move any objection to 
histories of science in the form of tables and encyclo- 
paedias on the ground that it is impossible for the same 
student to be equally competent as to problems of 
quite different nature, such as are those of the various 
sciences; for it is inconceivable that a philosopher 
exists with a capacity equal to the understanding of 
each and every philosophical problem (indeed, the mind 
of the best solver of certain problems is usually the 
more closed to others) ; or that a critic and historian 
of poetry and art exists who tastes and enjoys equally 
all forms of poetry and art, however versatile he be. 
Each one has his sphere marked out more or less 
narrowly, and each is universal only by means of his 
particularity. 

Finally, we shall not repeat the same demonstration 
for political history and ethics, where the claim to 
represent the whole of history in a single line of develop- 
ment has had less occasion to manifest itself. It is 
usually more readily admitted there that every history 
is particular — that is to say, determined by the political 
and ethical problem or problems with which history is 
concerned in time and place, and which every history 
therefore occasionally rethinks from the beginning. 

The analogy, then, between different kinds of special 
history is to be considered perfect, and the anomaly 
between them excluded, for they all obey the principle 
of particularity, that is, particular universality (whatever be 



146 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

the appearance to the contrary). But if, as histories, they all 
proceed according to the nature of what we have explained 
as historiography, in so far as they are special each one 
conforms to the concept of its speciality. It is in this 
sense alone that each one is anomalous in respect to 
the others, preserving, that is to say, its own peculiar 
nature. We have explained that the claim to treat the 
history of poetry and of art in the same way as philosophy 
is erroneous, not only because it misconceives the true 
concept of history, but also because it misrepresents 
the nature of art, conceiving it as philosophy and 
dissipating it in a dialectic of concepts, or because it 
leaves out, in the history of art, just that by reason of 
which art is art, looking upon it as something secondary, 
or at best giving it a place beside the social or conceptual 
activities. This error is precisely analogous to that of 
those who from time to time suggest what they term 
the * psychological * reform of philosophy — that is to 
say, they would like to treat it as dependent upon the 
psychology of philosophers and of the social environ- 
ment, thus placing it on a level, sometimes with the 
history of the sentiments, at others with that of 
fancies and Utopias, or with what is not the history 
of philosophizing. Such persons lack the knowledge of 
what philosophy is, as the others lack the knowledge of 
poetry and art. Anyone desirous of arriving at a rapid 
knowledge of the difference between the history of 
philosophy and the history of poetry should observe 
how the one, owing to the nature of its object, is led 
to examine theories in so far as they are the work of 
pure mind, and therefore to develop a history in which 
thoughts represent the dramatis persona, while the 
other is led by the nature of its object to examine works 
of art in so far as they are works of imagination, which 



SPECIAL HISTORIES 147 

gives expression to movements of feeling, and therefore 
to develop a history of imaginative and sensitive points 
of view. The former, therefore, though it does not 
neglect actions, events, and imagination, regards them as 
the humus of pure thought and takes the form of a history 
of concepts without persons^ either real or imaginary, 
while the latter, which also does not neglect actions, 
events, and thoughts in its turn regards them as the 
humus of imaginary creations and takes the form of a 
history of ideal or imaginary personalities, which have 
divested themselves of the ballast of practical interests 
and of the curb of concepts. The plans, too, which they 
draw up and with which they cannot dispense, any 
more than can any human dialectic, answer to these 
different tendencies — that is to say, with the one they 
are schemes or general types of modes of thinking, with 
the other schemes containing ideal personalities. 

If the history of philosophy has several times tried 
to devour the history of poetry and art, it may also be 
said to have several times tried to devour the history of 
practice, that of politics and ethics, or * social history,' 
as people prefer to call it in our day. It has also been 
asserted that such history should be set free from the 
chroniclism in which it had become involved and assume 
a scientific and rigorous form. To do this, it was needful 
to reduce it to a history of ' ideas,' which are the true 
and essential practical acts, because they generate them — 
that is to say, the error which we noted above in respect 
to poetry and art has here been repeated. What is 
peculiar to practical acts has been neglected, and only 
the * ideas,' which are their antecedents and consequents, 
have been retained. But on other occasions the * ideas * to 
which it was claimed to reduce practical acts were not 
really ideas or intellectual formations, but truly practical 



148 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

acts, sentiments, dispositions, customs, institutions. 
The originality of political and ethical history was thus 
unconsciously confirmed. Its object is just what can 
be designated with the single word institutions^ taking 
the word in its widest signification — that is to say, 
understanding by it all practical arrangements of human 
individuals and societies, from the most recondite 
sentiments to the most obvious modes of life (which, 
too, are always will in action). All are equally historical 
productions, the sole effective historical productions 
perceivable according to the practical form of the spirit. 
If the patrimony of judgments, as the capital with and 
upon which our modern thought works, is the result of a 
long history, of which we become conscious from time to 
time, illustrating now one and now another of its particular 
aspects at the solicitation of new needs, so also what we 
can now practically do^ all our sentiments as so-called 
civilized men— courage, honour, dignity, love, modesty, 
and the like — all our institutions in the strict sense of 
the term (which are themselves due to attitudes of the 
spirit, utilitarian or moral) — the family, the state, 
commerce, industry, military affairs, and so on — have 
a long history ; and according as one or other of those 
sentiments or institutions enters upon a crisis, as the 
result of new wants, we attempt to ascertain its true 
* nature ' — that is to say, its historical genesis. Any- 
one who has followed the developments of modern 
social historiography with care and attention has been 
able to see clearly that its aim is precisely to arrange the 
chroniclistic chaos of disaggregated notes of events in 
ordered series of histories of social values^ and that its 
field of research is the history of the human soul in its 
practical aspect ; either when it produces general 
histories of civilization (always due to particular motives 



SPECIAL HISTORIES 149 

and limited by them), or when it presents histories 
of classes^ peoples^ social currents^ sentiments^ institutions^ 
and so forth. 

Biography^ too (only when not limited to a mere 
chroniclistic collection of the experiences of an individual 
or to a poetical portrait, improperly regarded as a 
historical work), is the history of an * institution ' in the 
philosophical acceptation of the word and forms part 
of the history of practice : because the individual, 
in the same way as a people or a social class, is the 
formation of a character, or complex of specific attitudes 
and actions consequent upon them ; and it is of this 
that historical biography consists, not of the individual 
looked upon as external or private or physical, or what- 
ever it be called. 

We might be expected to indicate the place or function 
of the history of science and of religion^ in order to render 
to a certain extent complete this rapid review of special 
histories, in which general history realizes itself in turn 
— it never exists outside of them. But if science differs 
from philosophy in being partly theoretical and partly 
practical, and religion is an attempt to explain reality 
by means of myth and to direct the work of man 
according to an ideal, it is evident that the history of 
science enters to some extent into the history of philo- 
sophical thought and to some extent forms part of that 
of needs and institutions; indeed, since the moment which 
sets science to work and endows it with its peculiar 
character is the practical or suitable moment, it really 
belongs to the history of institutions in the very wide 
sense described ; and the history of religion forms to 
some extent part of the history of institutions and to some 
extent part of the history of philosophy; indeed, since 
the dominating moment is here mythical conception or 



i^o THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

philosophical effort, the history of religion is substan- 
tially that of philosophy. Other more particular dis- 
quisitions in connexion with this argument would be 
out of place in the present treatise, which is not especially 
concerned with the theory and methodology of par- 
ticular special histories (coincident wi h the treatment 
of the various spheres of philosophy, aesthetics, logic, 
etc.), and aims only at indicating the directions in which 
they must necessarily develop.^ 

^ It will be of further use to draw attention here, in a note, to the 
already mentioned distinction between the history of practice in politics 
and in ethics, because thus alone can be set at rest the variance which 
runs through historiography, between political history or history of states 
and history of humanity or of civilization, especially from the eighteenth 
century onward. In Germany it is one of the elements in the intricate 
debate between Geschichte and Kulturgeschichte, and it has sometimes been 
described as a conflict between French historiography (Voltaire and his 
followers), or histoire de la civilisation, and the Germanic (Moser and his 
followers), or history of the state. One side would absorb and subject 
the history of culture or social history to that of the state, the other 
would do the opposite ; and the eclectics, as usual, without knowing much 
about it, place the one beside the other, inert, history of politics and 
history of civilization, thus destroying the unity of history. The truth 
is that political history and history of civilization have the same rela- 
tions between one another in the practical field as those between the 
history of poetry or of art and the history of philosophy or thought in 
the theoretical field. They correspond to two eternal moments of the 
spirit— that of the pure will, or economic moment, and that of the ethical 
will. Hence we also see why some will always be attracted rather by 
the one than the other form of history : according as to whether they are 
moved chiefly by political or chiefly by moral interests. 



APPENDIX III 
PHILOSOPHY AND METHODOLOGY 

HAVING established the unity of philosophy and 
historiography, and shown that the division 
between the two has but a literary and didactic 
value, because it is founded upon the possibility of 
placing in the foreground of verbal exposition now 
one and now the other of the two dialectical elements 
of that unity, it is well to make quite clear what is the 
true object of the treatises bearing the traditional title 
of philosophic * theory ' or * system ' : to what (in a 
word) philosophy can he reduced. 

Philosophy, in consequence of the new relation in 
which it has been placed, cannot of necessity be any- 
thing but the methodological moment of historiography : a 
dilucidation of the categories constitutive of historical 
judgments, or of the concepts that direct historical 
interpretation. And since historiography has for con- 
tent the concrete life of the spirit, and this life is life 
of imagination and of thought, of action and of morality 
(or of something else, if anything else can be thought 
of), and in this variety of its forms remains always 
one, the dilucidation moves in distinguishing between 
aesthetic and logic, between economic and ethic, uniting 
and dissolving them all in the philosophy of the spirit. 
If a philosophical problem shows itself to be altogether 
sterile for the historical judgment, we have there the 
proof that such problem is otiose, badly stated, and in 
reality does not exist. If the solution of a problem — 
that is to say, of a philosophical proposition — instead 



152 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

of making history more intelligible, leaves it obscure 
or confounds it with others, or leaps over it and lightly 
condemns or negates it, we have there the proof that 
such proposition and the philosophy with which it is 
connected are arbitrary, though it may preserve interest 
in other respects, as a manifestation of sentiment or of 
imagination. 

The definition of philosophy as ' methodology ' is 
not at first exempt from doubts, even on the part of 
one ready to accept in general the tendency that it 
represents ; because philosophy and methodologv are 
terms often contrasted, and a philosophy that leads to 
a methodology is apt to be tainted with empiricism. 
But certainly the methodology of which we are here 
speaking is not at all empirical ; indeed, it appears just 
for the purpose of correcting and taking the place of 
the empirical methodology of professional historians 
and of other such specialists in all that greater part of 
it where it is a true and proper, though defective, 
attempt toward the philosophical solution of the theo- 
retical problems raised by the study of history, or 
toward philosophical methodology and philosophy as 
methodology. 

If, however, the above-mentioned dispute is settled 
as soon as stated, this cannot be said of another, where 
our position finds itself opposed to a widely diffused 
and ancient conception of philosophy as the solver of 
the mystery of the universe, knowledge of ultimate 
reality, revelation of the world of noumena, which is 
held to be beyond the world of phenomena, in which 
we move in ordinary life and in which history also 
moves. This is not the place to give the history of 
that idea; but we must at least say this, that its origin 
is religious or mythological, and that it persisted even 



PHILOSOPHY AND METHODOLOGY 153 

among those philosophers who were most successful 
in directing thought toward our earth as the sole reality, 
and initiated the new philosophy as methodology of the 
judgment or of historical knowledge. It persisted in 
Kant, who admitted it as the limit of his criticism; it 
persisted in Hegel, who framed his subtle researches in 
logic and philosophy of the spirit in a sort of mythology 
of the Idea. 

Nevertheless, the diversity of the two conceptions 
manifested itself in an ever-increasing ratio, finding 
expression in various formulas of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, such as psychology against metaphysic, a philosophy 
of experience and immanence^ aprioristic against tran- 
scendental philosophy, positivism against idealism ; and 
although the polemic was as a rule ill conducted, going 
beyond the mark and ending by unconsciously embracing 
that very metaphysic, transcendency, and apriority, that 
very abstract idealism, which it had set out to combat, 
the sentiment that inspired it was legitimate. And the 
philosophy of methodology has made it its own, has 
combated the same adversary with better arms, has 
certainly insisted upon a psychological view, but a 
speculative psychological view, immanent in history, but 
dialectically immanent, differing in this from positivism, 
that while the latter made necessary the contingent, it 
made the contingent necessary, thus affirming the right 
of thought to the hegemony. Such a philosophy is 
just philosophy as history (and so history as philosophy), 
and the determination of the philosophical moment in 
the purely categorical and methodological moment. 

The greater vigour of this conception in respect to 
the opposite, the superiority of philosophy as methodology 
over philosophy as metaphysic^ is shown by the capacity 
of the former to solve the problems of the latter by 



154 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

criticizing them and pointing out their origin. Meta- 
physic, on the other hand, is incapable of solving not 
only the problems of methodology, but even its own 
problems, without having recourse to the fantastic and 
arbitrary. Thus questions as to the reality of the 
external world, of soul-substance, of the unknowable, 
of dualisms and of antitheses, and so forth, have dis- 
appeared in gnoseological doctrines, which have sub- 
stituted better conceptions for those which we formerly 
possessed concerning the logic of the sciences, explain- 
ing those questions as eternally renascent aspects of the 
dialectic or phenomenology of knowledge. 

The view of philosophy as metaphysic is, however, so 
inveterate and so tenacious that it is not surprising that it 
should still give some sign of life in the minds of those 
who have set themselves free of it in general, but have 
not applied themselves to eradicating it in all its par- 
ticulars, nor closed all the doors by which it may return 
in a more or less unexpected manner. And if we 
rarely find it openly and directly displayed now, we may 
yet discern or suspect it in one or other of its aspects or 
attitudes, persisting like kinks of the mind, or uncon- 
scious preconceptions, which threaten to drive philosophy 
as methodology back into the wrong path, and to prepare 
the return, though but for a brief period, of the meta- 
physic that has been superseded. 

It seems to me opportune to provide here a clear 
statement of some of these preconceptions, tendencies, 
and habits, pointing out the errors which they contain 
and entail. 

First of all the survivals of the past that are still 
common comes the view of philosophy as having a 
fundamental problem to solve. Now the conception of 
a fundamental problem is intrinsically at variance with 



PHILOSOPHY AND METHODOLOGY 155 

that of philosophy as history, and with the treatment 
of philosophy as methodology of history, which posits, 
and cannot do otherwise than posit, the infinity of 
philosophical problems, all certainly connected with 
one another, but not one of which can be considered 
fundamental, for just the same reason that no single part 
of an organism is the foundation of all the others, but 
each one is in its turn foundation and founded. If, 
indeed, methodology take the substance of its problems 
from history, history in its most modest but concrete 
form of history of ourselves, of each one of us as an 
individual, this shows us that we pass on from one to 
another particular philosophical problem at the prompt- 
ings of our life as it is lived, and that one or the other 
group or class of problems holds the field or has especial 
interest for us, according to the epochs of our life. And 
we find the same to be the case if we look at the wider 
but less definite spectacle afforded by the already men- 
tioned general history of philosophy — that is to say, that 
according to times and peoples, philosophical problems 
relating sometimes to morality, sometimes to politics, 
to religion, or to the natural sciences and mathematics, 
have in turn the upper hand. Every particular philo- 
sopnical problem has been a problem of the whole of 
philosophy, either openly or by inference, but we never 
meet with a general problem of philosophy^ owing to the 
contradiction thereby implied. And if there does seem 
to be one (and it certainly does seem so), it is really a 
question of appearances, due to the fact that modern 
philosophy, which comes to us from the Middle Ages 
and was elaborated during the religious struggles of the 
Renaissance, has preserved a strong imprint of theology 
in its didactic form, not less than in the psychological 
disposition of the greater part of those addicted to it. 



156 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

Hence arises the fundamental and almost unique 
importance usurped by the problem of thought and 
being, which after all was nothing more than the old 
problem of this world and the next, of earth and 
heaven, in a critical and gnoseological form. But 
those who destroyed or who initiated the destruction 
of heaven and of the other world and of transcendental 
philosophy by immanent philosophy began at the same 
moment to corrode the conception of a fundamental 
problem, although they were not fully aware of this 
(for we have said above that they remained tram- 
melled in the philosophy of the Thing in Itself or in the 
Mythology of the Idea). That problem was rightly 
fundamental for religious spirits, who held that the 
whole intellectual and practical dominion of the world 
was nothing, unless they had saved their own souls or 
their own thought in another world, in the knowledge 
of a world of noumena and reality. But such it was 
not destined to remain for the philosophers, henceforth 
restricted to the world alone or to nature, which has no 
skin and no kernel and is all of a piece. What would 
happen were we to resume belief in a fundamental 
problem, dominating all others ? The other problems 
would either have to be considered as all dependent 
upon it and therefore solved with it, or as problems 
no longer philosophical but empirical. That is to say, 
all the problems appearing every day anew in science 
and life would lose their value, either becoming a 
tautology of the fundamental solution or being com- 
mitted to empirical treatment. Thus the distinction 
between philosophy and methodology, between meta- 
physic and philosophy of the spirit, would reappear, the 
first transcendental as regards the second, the second 
aphilosophical as regards the first. 



PHILOSOPHY AND METHODOLOGY 157 

Another view, arising from the old metaphysical 
conception of the function of philosophy, leads to the 
rejection of distinction in favour of unity^ thus con- 
forming to the theological conception that all distinctions 
are unified by absorption in God, and to the religious 
point of view, which forgets the world and its necessities 
in the vision of God. From this ensues a disposition 
which may be described as something between in- 
different, accommodating, or weak, in respect of particu- 
lar problems, and the pernicious doctrine of the double 
faculty is almost tacitly renewed, that is, of intellectual 
intuition or other superior cognoscitive faculty, peculiar to 
the philosopher and leading to the vision of true reality, 
and of criticism or thought prone to interest itself in 
the contingent and thus greatly inferior in degree and 
free to proceed with a lack of speculative rigour not 
permissible in the other. Such a disposition led to the 
worst possible consequences in the philosophical treatises 
of the Hegelian school, where the disciples (differing 
from the master) generally gave evidence of having 
meditated but little or not at all upon the problems 
of the various spiritual forms, freely accepting vulgar 
opinions concerning them, or engaging in them with the 
indifference of men sure of the essential, and therefore 
cutting and mutilating them without pity, in order to 
force them into their pre-established schemes with all 
haste, thus getting rid of difficulties by means of this 
illusory arrangement. Hence the emptiness and tire- 
someness of their philosophies, from which the historian, 
or the man whose attention is directed to the under- 
standing of the particular and the concrete, failed to 
learn anything that could be of use to him in the direction 
of his own studies and in the clearer formulation of his 
own judgments. And since the mythology of the idea 



158 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

reappeared in positivism as mythology of evolution, 
here too particular problems (which are indeed the only 
philosophical problems) received merely schematic and 
empty treatment and did not progress at all. Philo- 
sophy as history and methodology of history restores 
honour to the virtue of acuteness or discernment, which 
the theological unitarianism of metaphysic tended to 
depreciate: discernment, which is prosaic but severe, 
hard and laborious but prolific, which sometimes 
assumes the unsympathetic aspect of scholasticism and 
pedantry, but is also of use in this aspect, like every 
discipline, and holds that the neglect of distinction for 
unity is also intimately opposed to the conception of 
philosophy as history. 

A third tendency (I beg to be allowed to proceed by 
enumeration of the various sides of the same mental 
attitude for reasons of convenience), a third tendency 
also seeks the definitive philosophy, untaught by the 
historical fact that no philosophy has ever been definitive 
or has set a limit to thought, or has ever been thoroughly 
convinced that the perpetual changing of philosophy 
with the world which perpetually changes is not by any 
means a defect, but is the nature itself of thought and 
reality. Or, rather, such teaching, and the proposition 
that follows it, do not fail altogether of acceptance, and 
they are led to believe that the spirit, ever growing 
upon itself, produces thoughts and systems that are 
ever new. But since they have retained the pre- 
supposition of a fundamental problem which (as we 
have said) substantially consists of the ancient problem 
of religion alone, and each problem well determined 
implies a single solution, the solution given of the 
* fundamental problem ' naturally claims to be the 
definitive solution of the problem of philosophy itself. 



PHILOSOPHY AND METHODOLOGY 159 

A new solution could not appear without a new problem 
(owing to the logical unity of problem and solution); 
but that problem, which is superior to all the others, 
is on the contrary the only one. Thus a definitive 
philosophy, assumed in the conception of the funda- 
mental problem, is at variance with historical experience, 
and more irreconcilably, because in a more evidently 
logical manner, with philosophy as history, which, 
admitting infinite problems, denies the claim for and 
the expectation of a definitive philosophy. Every 
philosophy is definitive for the problem which it solves, 
but not for the one that appears immediately afterward, 
at the foot of the first, nor for the other problems which 
will arise from the solution of this. To close the series 
would be to turn from philosophy to religion and to 
rest in God. 

Indeed, the fourth preconception, which we now 
proceed to state, and which links itself with the pre- 
ceding, and, together with all the preceding, to the 
theological nature of the old metaphysic, concerns the 
figure of the philosopher^ as Buddha or the Awakened One, 
who posits himself as superior to others (and to himself 
in the moments when he is not a philosopher), because 
he holds himself to be free from human passions, illusions, 
and agitations by means of philosophy. This is the 
case with the believer, who fixes his mind upon God and 
shakes off earthly cares, like the lover, who feels himself 
blessed in the possession of the beloved and defies the 
whole world. But the world soon takes its revenge 
both upon the believer and the lover, and does not fail 
to insist upon its rights. Such an illusion is impossible 
for the philosophical historian, who differs from the other 
in feeling himself irresistibly involved in the course of 
history, as at once both subject and object, and who is 



i6o THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

therefore led to negate felicity or beatitude, as he negates 
every other abstraction (because, as has been well said, 
le honheur est le contraire de la sensation de vivre)^ and to 
accept life as it is, as joy that overcomes sorrow and 
perpetually produces new sorrows and new unstable 
joys. And history, which he thinks as the only truth, 
is the work of tireless thought, which conditions practical 
work, as practical work conditions the new work of 
thought. Thus the primacy formerly attributed to 
the contemplative life is now transferred not to active 
life, but to life in its integrity, which is at once thought 
and action. And every man is a philosopher (in his 
circle, however wide or narrow it may appear), and every 
philosopher is a man, indissolubly linked to the conditions 
of human life, which it is not given to anyone to tran- 
scend. The mystical or apocalyptic philosopher of the 
Graeco-Roman decadence was well able to separate 
himself from the world : the great thinkers, like Hegel, 
who inaugurated the epoch of modern philosophy, 
although they denied the primacy of the abstract 
contemplative life, were liable to fall back into the error 
of belief in this supremacy and to conceive a sphere 
of absolute spirit, a process of liberation through art, 
religion, and philosophy, as a means of reaching it ; 
but the once sublime figure of the philosopher blessed 
in the absolute, when we try to revive it in this modern 
world of ours, becomes tinged with the comic. It is 
true that satire has now but little material upon which 
to exercise itself, and is reduced to aiming its shafts at 
the * professors of philosophy ' (according to the type 
of philosopher that has been created by modern univer- 
sities, which is partly the heir of the ' master of theology ' 
of the Middle Ages : against the professors, that is to 
say, to the extent that they continue to repeat mechani- 



PHILOSOPHY AND METHODOLOGY i6i 

cally abstract general propositions, and seem to be 
unmoved by the passions and the problems that press 
upon them from all sides and vainly ask for more con- 
crete and actual treatment. But the function and the 
social figure of the philosopher have profoundly changed, 
and we have not said that the manner of being of the 

* professors of philosophy ' will not also change in its 
turn — that is to say, that the way of teaching philosophy 
in the universities and schools is not on the verge of 
experiencing a crisis, which will eliminate the last 
remains of the medieval fashion of formalistic philo- 
sophizing. A strong advance in philosophical culture 
should lead to this result : that all students of human 
affairs, jurists, economists, moralists, men of letters- — 
in other words, all students of historical matters — 
should become conscious and disciplined philosophers, 
and that thus the philosopher in general, the purus 
philosophus, should find no place left for him among the 
professional specifications of knowledge. With the 
disappearance of the philosopher ' in general ' would 
also disappear the last social vestige of the teleologist 
or metaphysician, and of the Buddha or Awakened One. 

There is also a prejudice which to some extent in- 
quinates the manner of culture of students of philosophy. 
They are accustomed to have recourse almost exclusively 
to the books of philosophers, indeed of philosophers 

* in general,' of the metaphysical system-makers, in 
the same way as the student of theology formed himself 
upon the sacred texts. This method of culture, which 
is perfectly consequent when a start is made from the 
presupposition of a fundamental or single problem, 
of which it is necessary to know the different diverging 
and progressive solutions which have been attempted, 
is altogether inconsequent and inadequate in the case of 



1 62 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

a historical and immanent philosophy, which draws its 
material from all the most varied impressions of life 
and from all intuitions and reflections upon life. That 
form of culture is the reason for the aridity of the treat- 
ment of certain particular problems, for which is necessary 
a continued contact with daily experience (art and art 
criticism for aesthetic, politics, economy, judicial trials 
for the philosophy of rights, positive and mathematical 
sciences for the gnoseology of the sciences, and so on). 
To it is also due the aridity of treatment of those parts 
of philosophy themselves which are traditionally con- 
sidered to constitute * general philosophy,* for they too 
had their origin in life, and we must refer them back 
to life if we are to give a satisfactory interpretation of 
their propositions ; we must plunge them into life again 
to develop them and to find in them new aspects. The 
whole of history is the foundation of philosophy as history, 
and to limit its foundation to the history of -philosophy 
alone, and of ' general ' or ' metaphysical ' philosophy, 
is impossible, save by unconsciously adhering to the 
old idea of philosophy, not as methodology but as 
metaphysic, which is the fifth of the prejudices that 
we are enumerating. 

This enumeration can be both lengthened and ended 
with the mention of a sixth preconception, relating to 
philosophical exposition. Owing to this, philosophy is 
expected to have either an architectural form, as though 
it were a temple consecrated to the Eternal, or a warm 
poetical form, as though it were a hymn to the Eternal. 
But these forms were part of the old content, and that 
form is now changed. Philosophy shows itself to be 
a dilucidation of the categories of historical interpre- 
tation rather than the grandiose architecture of a 
temple or a sacred hymn running on conventional lines. 



PHILOSOPHY AND METHODOLOGY 163 

Philosophy is discussion, polemic, rigorous didactic 
exposition, which is certainly coloured with the senti- 
ments of the writer, like every other literary form, able 
also at times to raise its voice (or on the other hand to 
become slight and playful, according to circumstances), 
but not constrained to observe rules which appear to 
be proper to a theological or religious content. Philo- 
sophy treated as methodology has, so to speak, caused 
philosophical exposition to descend from poetry to 
prose. 

All the preconceptions, habits, and tendencies which 
I have briefly described should in my opinion be care- 
fully sought out and eliminated, for it is they that impede 
philosophy from taking the form and proceeding in the 
mode suitable and adequate to the consciousness of the 
unity with history which it has reached. If we look 
merely at the enormous amount of psychological obser- 
vations and moral doubts accumulated in the course 
of the nineteenth century by poetry, fiction, and drama, 
those voices of our society, and consider that in great 
part it remains without critical treatment, some idea 
can be formed of the immense amount of work that 
falls to philosophy to accomplish. And if on the other 
hand we observe the multitude of anxious questions 
that the great European War has everywhere raised — as 
to the state, as to history, as to rights, as to the functions 
of the different peoples, as to civilization, culture, and 
barbarism, as to science, art, religion, as to the end 
and ideal of life, and so on — we realize the duty 
of philosophers to issue forth from the theologico- 
metaphysical circle in which they remain confined even 
when they refuse to hear of theology and metaphysic. 
For notwithstanding their protests, and notwithstanding 
the new conception accepted and professed by them. 



1 64 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

they really remain intellectually and spiritually attached 
to the old ideas. 

Even the history itself of philosophy has hitherto been 
renewed only to a small extent, in conformity with the 
new conception of philosophy. This new conception in- 
vites us to direct our attention to thoughts and thinkers, 
long neglected or placed in the second rank and not 
considered to be truly philosophers because they did 
not treat directly the ' fundamental problem ' of philo- 
sophy or the great peut-etre^ but were occupied with 
* particular problems.' These particular problems, how- 
ever, were destined to produce eventually a change of 
view as regards the ' general problem,' which emerged 
itself reduced to the rank of a * particular ' problem. 
It is simply the result of prejudice to look upon a Machia- 
velli, who posited the conception of the modern state, 
a Baltasar Gracian, who examined the question of 
acuteness in practical matters, a Pascal, who criticized 
the spirit of Jesuitry, a Vico, who renewed all the sciences 
of the spirit, or a Hamann, with his keen sense of the 
value of tradition, as minor philosophers, I do not say in 
comparison with some metaphysician of little originality, 
but even when compared with a Descartes or a Spinoza, 
who dealt with other but not superior problems. A 
schematic and bloodless history of philosophy corre- 
sponded, in fact, with the philosophy of the 'fundamental 
problem.' A far richer, more varied and pliant philo- 
sophy should correspond with philosophy as methodology, 
which holds to be philosophy not only what appertains 
to the problems of immanency, of transcendency, of 
this world and the next, but everything that has been 
of avail in increasing the patrimony of guiding con- 
ceptions, the understanding of actual history, and the 
formation of the reality of thought in which we live. 



PART II 

CONCERNING THE HISTORY OF 
HISTORIOGRAPHY 

I 

PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS 

WE possess many works relating to the history of 
historiography, both special, dealing with indi- 
vidual authors, and more or less general, 
dealing with groups of authors (histories of historiography 
confined to one people and to a definite period, or alto- 
gether * universal ' histories). Not only have we biblio- 
graphical works and works of erudition, but criticism, 
some of it excellent, especially in the case of German 
scientific literature, ever the most vigilant of all in not 
leaving unexplored any nook or cranny of the dominion 
of knowledge. It cannot, therefore, form part of my 
design to treat the theme from its foundations : but I 
propose to make a sort of appendix or critical annotation 
to the collection of books and essays that I have read 
upon the argument. I will not say that these are all, or 
even that they are all those of any importance, but they 
are certainly a considerable number. By means of this 
annotation I shall try to establish, on the one hand, in 
an exact manner and in conformity with the principles 
explained, the method of such a history, regarding which I 
observe that there still exist confusion and perplexity, even 
among the best, which lead to errors of judgment or at 
least of plan, and on the other hand I shall try to outline 

165 



1 66 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

the principal periods in a summary manner, both with the 
view of exemplifying the method established, and, as it 
were, of illustrating historically the concepts exposed in the 
preceding theoretical pages, which might otherwise retain 
here and there something of an abstract appearance. 

Beginning with methodical delimitations, I shall note 
in the first place that in a history of historiography 
as such, historical writings cannot be looked upon from 
the point of view proper to a history of literature — that is 
to say, as expressions of individual sentiments, as forms 
of art. Doubtless they are this also, and have a perfect 
right to form part of histories of literature, as the treatises 
and systems of the philosophers, the writings of Plato 
and Aristotle, of Bruno, of Leibnitz, and of Hegel ; 
but in this case both are regarded not as works of 
history and of philosophy, but of literature and poetry ; 
and the empirical scale of values which constitute the 
different modes of history in the cases of the same 
authors is different, because in a history of literature 
the place of a Plato will always be more considerable 
than that of an Aristotle, that of a Bruno than that of a 
Leibnitz, owing to the greater amount of passion and 
the greater richness of artistic problems contained in 
the former of each pair. The fact that in many volumes 
of literary history such diversity of treatment is not 
observed, and historians are talked of historically and not 
in a literary manner and philosophers philosophically 
rather than in a literary manner, is due to the substitution 
in such works of incoherent compilation for work that 
is properly critical and scientific. But the distinction 
between the two aspects is important for this reason 
also, that erroneous judgments, praise, and censure, alike 
unjustified, are apt to appear, owing to the careless trans- 
ference of the scale of values from one history to another. 



PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS 167 

The slight esteem in which Polybius was held in antiquity 
and for some time after, because ' he did not write well ' 
in comparison with the splendour of Livy or with the 
emotional intensity of Tacitus, is an instance of this, 
as is likewise in Italy the excessive praise lavished upon 
certain historians who were little more than correct and 
elegant writers of prose in comparison with others who 
were negligent and crude in their form, but serious 
students. Ulrici,^ in his youthful book on ancient 
historiography, which despite its heaviness and verbosity 
of exposition has great merits, after having discussed the 
* scientific value ' of that historiography, also speaks at 
great length of * artistic value ' ; but setting aside what 
of arbitrary is to be found in some of the laws that he 
applies to historiography as art, in conformity with the 
aesthetic ideas of his time, it is evident that the second 
subject of which he treats does not coalesce with the 
first and is only placed side by side with it in the same 
way as those sections of works dealing with historical 
method are not connected but simply juxtaposed, and 
after having studied in their own way the formation of 
historical thought, the collection of materials or * heuristic,* 
up to final * comprehension,' begin to discuss the form 
of the * exposition,' and in so doing continue without 
being aware of it the method of rhetorical treatises on 
the art of history composed during the Renaissance. 
These have their chief exponent in Vossius (1623). We 
cannot abstain from sometimes mentioning the literary 
form of the works of historians, nor from according 
their laurels to works of remarkable literary value, while 
noting their unsatisfactory historiographical methods ; 
but to touch here and there upon, to discuss, to charac- 
terize, to eliminate, is of secondary importance and 

^ Charakteristik der antiken Histoviographie (Berlin, 1833). 



1 68 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

does not form part of the proper function of historio- 
graphy, whose object is the development of historiographical 
thought. 

The distinction between this history and that of 
philology or erudition is less apparent but not less in- 
dubitable, always, be it well understood, in the sense 
explained, of a distinction that is not a separation. This 
warning should be understood in respect of other ex- 
clusions that we are about to effect, without our being 
obliged to repeat it at every step ; for the connexion 
between history and philology is undeniable, not less 
than that between history and art, or history and prac- 
tical life. But that does not prevent philology in itself 
being the collection, the rearrangement, the purification 
of material, and not history. Owing to this quality 
it forms a part rather of the history of culture than of 
that of thought. It would be impossible to disassociate 
it from the history of libraries, archives, museums, 
universities, seminaries, ecoles des chartes, academical and 
editorial enterprises, and from other institutions and 
proceedings of an entirely practical nature. Fueter has 
therefore been right in excluding from his theme in his 
recent work on the history of modern historiography ^ 
" the history of merely philological research and 
criticism." This has not prevented him from taking 
store where apposite of the school of Biondo or of that 
of Maurini, or of the perfecting of the method of 
seeking for the sources attained by the German school 
in the nineteenth century. The confusion and lack 
of development observable in the old and solid work 
of Wachler ^ is perhaps due to his having failed to make 

^ Geschichte der neueren Historiographie (Miinchen u. Berlin, Olden- 
burg, 1911). 

" Geschichte der historischen Forschung und Kunst seit der Wiederher- 
stellung der literarischen Cultur in Europa (Gottingen, 1812-20). 



PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS 169 

this distinction, to which recourse can also be had with 
advantage elsewhere. Wachler's work, entitled and 
conceived as " history of research and of the historical 
art from the Renaissance of letters in Europe onward," 
ended by assuming the appearance of a repertory or 
bibliographical catalogue. 

The obstacles to be encountered by the distinction 
between the history of historiography and that of the 
■practical tendencies^ or tendencies of the social and political 
spirit^ are more intricate. These indeed become in- 
corporated with or at least leave their mark upon the 
works of historians ; but it is just because we can only 
with difficulty perceive the line of demarcation that it 
is indispensable to make it quite clear. Such tendencies, 
such social and political spirit, belong rather to the 
matter than to the theoretical form of history ; they are 
not so much historiography as history in the act and in 
its fieri. Machiavelli is a historian in so far as he tries 
to understand the course of events ; he is a politician, 
or at least a publicist, when he posits and desires a 
prince, founder of a strong national state, as his ideal, 
reflecting this in his history. This history, in so far as it 
portrays that ideal and the inspiration and teaching that 
accompany it, here and there becomes fable (^jahula 
docet). Thus Machiavelli belongs partly to the history 
of thought in the Renaissance and partly to the history 
of the practice of the Renaissance. Nor does this 
happen solely in political and social historiography, 
but also in literary and artistic, because there is not 
perhaps a critic in the world, however unprejudiced 
and broad in his ideas, who does not manifest ten- 
dencies in the direction of a literary renovation of 
his epoch together with his actual judgments and 
reconstructions. Now to the extent that he does this, 



I70 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

even if it be in the same book and on the same page or 
in the same period, he is no longer a critic, but a practical 
reformer of art. In one domain of history alone is this 
pacific accompaniment of interpretations and aspirations 
impossible — in the history of philosophy, because when, 
as here, there is a difference between historical interpre- 
tation and the tendency of the philosopher, the difference 
reveals the insufficiency of the interpretation itself : in 
other words, if the theory of the historian of philosophy 
is at war with the theories of which he claims to expound 
the history, his theory must be false, just because it 
does not avail to justify the history of the theories. But 
this exception does not annul the distinction in other 
fields ; indeed, it confirms it, and is not an exception 
in the empirical sense, as it appears to be : thought 
distinguishes and is distinguished from sentiment and 
will, but it is not distinguished from itself, precisely 
because it is the principle of distinction. A methodo- 
logical corollary of this distinction between history of 
historiography and history of practical tendencies is 
that the introduction into the first of considerations 
belonging to the second is to be held erroneous. Here 
I think Fueter has sinned to some extent in the book 
to which I have already referred, where he divides his 
material into humanistic, political, party, imperial, 
particularist, Protestant, Catholic, Jesuitic, illuministic, 
romanticist, erudite, liri co-subjective, national, statolatral, 
historiographical, and the like. Only some of the above 
divisions belong to, or can properly be reduced to, 
historiographical concepts, while the majority refer 
to social and political life. Hence the lack of sound 
organization that we observe in this book, which is yet 
so lively and ingenious : its divisions follow one another 
without sufficient logicality, continuity, and necessity, 



PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS 171 

and are not the result of a single thought which posits 
them and develops itself through them. If, on the 
other hand, the genuinely historiographical portions, 
which have become mingled with it, should be eliminated, 
what remained could certainly be organized, but as 
social and political history, no longer as historiography, 
because the works of historians would be consulted only 
as documents showing the tendencies of the times in 
which they were written. Machiavelli, for instance, 
(to use the same example) would there figure as an 
Italian patriot and defender of absolute power, while 
Vico (a much greater historian than Machiavelli) would 
not be able to appear at all, or hardly at all, because 
his relation with the political life of his time was remote 
and general. 

What I have been expounding may be resumed by 
saying that the history of historiography is neither literary 
history nor the history of cultural, social, political, moral 
doings, which are of a -practical nature, but that it is 
certainly all these things, by reason of the unbreakable 
unity of history, though with it the accent does not fall 
upon practical facts, but rather upon historiographical 
thought^ which is its proper subject. 

Having pointed out or recalled these distinctions, 
which, as we have seen, are sometimes neglected with 
evil results, we must now utter a warning against other 
distinctions, employed without rational basis, which 
rather overcloud and trouble the history of historiography 
than shed light upon it. 

Fueter (I cite him again, although the error is not 
peculiar to him) declares that he has dealt in his book 
with historiographical theories and with historical method 
only in so far as they seem to have had influence upon 
actual historiography. The history of historicity (here 



172 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

is the reason he gives for the method he has followed) 
is as little the history of historiography as is the history 
of dramatic theories the history of the drama. This 
he considers to be proved by the fact that theory and 
practice often follow different paths, as, for instance, in 
Lope de Vega, whose theory of the drama and actual 
dramatic work were two different things, to such an 
extent that it was said of the Spanish dramatist that 
although he reverenced the poetical art, when he sat 
down to compose "he locked up the correct rules under 
seven keys." This argument is without doubt specious, 
and I was myself formerly seduced by it ; but it is 
fallacious, as I realized when I thought it over again, 
and I now affirm it to be an error with all the conviction 
and authority of one who criticizes an error at one time 
his own. The argument is founded upon a false analogy 
between the production of art and that of history. Art, 
which is the work of the imagination, can be well dis- 
tinguished from the theory of art, which is the work 
of reflection ; artistic genius produces the former, the 
speculative intellect the latter, and it often happens 
with artists that the speculative intellect is inferior to 
their genius, so that they do one thing and say another, 
or say one thing and do another, without its being 
possible to accuse them of logical incoherence, because 
the incoherence is between two discordant thoughts, . 
never between a thought and an act of the imagination. 
But history and theory of history are both of them works 
of thought, bound to one another in the same way as 
thought is bound to itself, since it is one. Thus no 
historian but possesses in a more or less reflective way 
his theory of history, because, not to put too fine a point 
upon it, every historian implicitly or explicitly conducts 
a polemic against other historians (against other * versions * 



PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS 173 

and * judgments * of a fact), and how could he ever 
conduct a polemic or criticize others if he did not himself 
possess a conception of what history is and ought to be, 
to which to refer, a theory of history ? The artist, on 
the other hand, in so far as he is an artist, does not 
polemize or criticize, but forms. It may quite well 
happen that an erroneous theory of historiography is 
expounded, while on the contrary the history as narrated 
may turn out to be well constructed. This is, of course, 
to be incoherent, but is so neither more nor less than 
when progress is effected in one branch of historiography, 
while there is backwardness in another. There may 
obtain, on the contrary, an excellent theory of history, 
where history itself is bad ; but in the same way that 
in one field of historiography there is the sense of and 
striving for a better method, while there is adherence 
to old methods in all the other fields. The history of 
historiography is the history of historical thought ; and 
here it is impossible to distinguish theory of history 
from history. 

Another exclusion which Fueter declares that he has 
made is that of the philosophy of history. He does not 
give the reason for this, but allows it to be understood, 
for he evidently holds that philosophies of history do 
not possess a purely scientific character and are lacking 
in truth. But not only are what are called * philo- 
sophies of history ' erroneous conceptions of history, but 
so also are the naturalistic or deterministic conceptions 
opposed to them, and all the various forms of pseudo- 
history which have been described above, philological 
history, poetical history, rhetorical history. I do not 
find that he has excluded these from his history, any 
more than he has really excluded the theological and 
transcendental conception of history (philosophy of 



174 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

history) ; indeed, he constantly refers to it. Justice 
and logic would insist upon all or none being excluded 
— all really excluded, and not merely in words. But to 
exclude all of them, it may be said, would be anything 
but intelligent, because how could the history of his- 
tory ever be told in such a void ? What is this history 
but the struggle of scientific historiography against 
inadequate scientific formulas ? Certainly the former is 
the protagonist, but how could a drama be presented 
with a protagonist lacking antagonists ? And even if 
historical philology be not considered directly, but 
referred back to philology, if poetical history be 
referred back to literature, rhetorical or practical to 
social and political history, it would nevertheless be 
necessary always to take account of the conversion that 
often occurs of those various mental constructions into 
assertions of reality, taken in exchange for and given 
the value of true and proper histories. In this sense 
they become in turn deterministic or transcendental con- 
ceptions of history, and both of them logical or illogical 
representations of all the others, and end by becoming 
equivalent to one another dialectically, and are always 
before the eyes of the historian, because the perpetual 
condition and the perpetual sign of the progress of 
historical thought reside in their movement, which 
passes from transcendency or false immanence to pure 
immanence, to return to them and enter into a more 
profound conception of immanency. To exclude philoso- 
phies of history from the history of historiography 
does not, therefore, seem to me to be justifiable, 
for the same reason as it seems to be unjustifiable to 
exclude from it historiographical theories, which are 
the consciousness that historiography acquires of itself : 
owing to their homogeneity, I say, owing indeed to 



PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS 175 

their identity with history, of which they do not form 
accidental ingredients or material elements, but con- 
stitute the very essence. A proof of this is to be found 
in the Historical Philosophy of France of Flint. He pro- 
ceeds from a presumption that is perhaps the opposite 
of that of Fueter — that is to say, he treats of the 
philosophy of history, and not of history, but finds it 
impossible to maintain the dykes between the two. His 
treatise, therefore, when artificial obstacles have been 
overcome, runs like a single river and reveals to our 
view the whole history of historical French thought, to 
which Bossuet and Rollin, Condorcet and Voltaire, 
Auguste Comte and Michelet or Tocqueville equally 
belong. 

At this point it will probably be objected (although 
Fueter does not propound this objection, it is probable 
that it is at the back of his mind) that what is desired 
in a history of historiography is not so much a history 
of historical thought as a history of history in the concrete : 
of the Storie fiorentine of Machiavelli, of the Sikle 
de Louis XIV of Voltaire, or of the R'dmische Geschichte 
of Niebuhr : that would be a general history, while 
what is desired is a specific history. But it is well to 
pay close attention to the meaning of such a request 
and to the possibility of what is asked. If I set 
out to write the history of the Storie fiorentine of 
Machiavelli, in respect to the particular material with 
which it deals, I shall rewrite the history of Florence, 
criticizing and completing Machiavelli, and shall thus 
be, for instance, a Villari, a Davidsohn, or a Salvemini. 
If I set out to write the history of the material of 
Voltaire's work, I shall criticize Voltaire and outline a 
new Siecle de Louis XIV, as has been done, for example, 
by Philippson. And if I set to work to examine and 



176 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

rethink the work of Niebuhr in respect to its particular 
material, I shall be a new historian of Rome, a Mommsen 
or (to quote the most recent writers) a Hector Pais or 
a Gaetano de Sanctis. But is this what is desired ? 
Certainly not. But if this be not desired, if the parti- 
cular materials of those histories are not to be taken 
account of, what else remains save the * way ' in which 
they have been conceived, the ' mental form ' by means 
of which they construct their narratives, and therefore 
their theory and their historical ' thought ' ? 

Now, if this truth be admitted (and I do not see 
how it can be contested) it is not possible to reject ' 
an ulterior consequence which, although it is wont to 
arouse in some the sensation of a paradox, does not | 
do so in us, for we find it altogether in accordance 
with the conception of the identity of history with 
philosophy that we have defended. Is a thought that 
is not thought conceivable ? Is it permissible to dis- 
tinguish between the thought of the historian and the 
thought of the philosopher ? Are there perhaps two 
different thoughts in the world } To persist in main- 
taining that the thought of the historian thinks the 
fact and not the theory is prevented by the preceding 
admission, if by nothing else : that the historian always 
thinks at least both the theory of history and the 
historical fact. But this admission entails his thinking 
the theory of all the things that he narrates, together 
with the theory of history. And indeed he could not 
narrate without understanding them. Fueter extols the 
merit of Winckelmann, who was the first to conceive 
a history, not of artists, but of art, of a pure spiritual 
activity, and that of Giannone, who was the first to 
attempt a history of the life of jurisprudence. But 
these writers made the progress they did because they 



PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS 177 

had a new and more accurate conception of art and of 
rights, and if they went wrong as to certain points, 
that is because they did not always think those con- 
ceptions with equal exactitude. Winckelmann, for 
instance, materialized the spiritual activity of the artist 
when he posited an abstract, fixed material ideal of 
beauty, and gave an abstract history of artistic styles 
without regard to the temperaments, historical circum- 
stances, and individualities of the artists themselves. 
Giannone failed to supersede the dualism of Church 
and State. Without indulging in other too particular 
examples, it is evident at the first glance that ancient 
historiography concords with the ancient conception of 
religion of the state, of ethic, and of the whole of reality ; 
the medieval with Christian theology and ethic ; that 
of the first half of the nineteenth century with the 
idealistic and romantic philosophy, that of the second 
half with naturalistic and positivistic philosophy. Thus, 
ex parte historicorum^ there is no way of distinguishing 
historical and philosophical thought, which are perfectly 
commingled in the narratives. But there is also no 
possibility of maintaining such a distinction ex parte 
philosophorum either, because, as all know, or at least 
say, each period has the philosophy proper to it, which 
is the consciousness of that period, and as such is its 
history, at least in germ; or, as we have put it, philo- 
sophy and history coincide. And if they coincide, the 
history of philosophy and the history of historiography 
also coincide : the one is not only not distinguishable 
from the other, but is not even subordinate to the 
other, for it is all one with it. 

The historiography of philosophy has already begun 
to open its arms, inviting and receiving the works of 
the historians. Every day it understands better that a 



178 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

history of Greek thought is not complete without taking 
count of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Polybius, nor of 
Roman thought without Livy and Tacitus, nor of the 
thought of the Renaissance without MachiavelU and 
Guicciardini. It must open them yet wider and clasp 
to its bosom even the humble medieval historiographers 
who noted the Gesta episcoporufn or Historiola trans- 
lationum or Vit^e sanctorum, or who bear witness to the 
Christian faith, according to their powers and in their 
own way, it is true, but not less than the great Augustine 
according to his powers. It must receive not only the 
hagiographical writers, but even obtuse philologists or 
sociologists who have amused us during the last decades 
and bear witness to the creed of positivism not other- 
wise than as Spencer or Haeckel in their systems. By 
means of this amplification of concepts and enrichment 
of material, the historiography of philosophy will place 
itself in the position of being able to show that philo- 
sophy is a force diffused throughout life, and not the 
particular invention and cult of certain men who are 
philosophers, and will obtain the means that have 
hitherto been lacking to effect a close conjunction with 
the whole historical movement. 

In its turn the history of historiography will gain 
by the fusion, because it will find its own directive 
principles in philosophy, and by its means will be 
rendered capable of understanding both the problems 
of history in general and those of its various aspects 
as history of art and of philosophy, of economic and 
moral life. To seek elsewhere the criterion of explana- 
tion is vain. Fueter, who takes a glance at the most 
recent historiography, that posterior to 1870, at the 
end of his book, discerns in it the new consciousness 
that gives the highest place to political and military 



PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS 179 

power and marks the end of the old liberalism, the 
strengthening of such consciousness by means of the 
Darwinian theories concerning the struggle for life, 
the influence of a more intense economical and industrial 
life and a greater intensity of world politics, the reper- 
cussion of Egyptian and Orientalistic discoveries, which 
have aided in disproving the illusion of Europe as the 
centre of the world, the attraction exercised by the 
theory of races, and so on. These observations are 
just, but they do not reach the heart and brain of the 
most recent historiography; they merely revolve round 
its body. The heart or brain is, as I have observed, 
naturalism,) the ideal of historical culture inspired and to 
be inspired by the natural sciences. So true is this 
that Fueter himself burns a few grains of incense before 
this idol, sighing for a form of history that shall be 
beautiful with the beauty of a well-made machine, 
rivalling a book on physics such as the Theory of Tones 
of Helmholtz. The truth is that the ideal of the natural 
sciences, instead of being the perfection, is one of the 
many crises that historical thought has passed through 
and will pass through. Historical thought is dialectic 
of development, and not by any means a deterministic 
explanation by means of causes which does not explain 
anything because it does not develop anything. But 
whatever we may think of this, it is certain that 
naturalism — that is, the criticism of naturalism — can 
alone supply the clue for unravelling the web of the 
historiography of the last ten years ; the same events 
and historical movements enumerated above have acted 
in the particular way in which they have acted owing to 
being constantly framed in naturalistic thought. 

For the rest, nothing forbids, and it may even serve 
a useful purpose, that the history of philosophy and the 



i8o HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

history of historiography should receive literary treat- 
ment in different books, for altogether practical reasons, 
such, for instance, as the abundance of material and 
the different training and acquirements needed for the 
treatment of the different classes of material. But 
what is apparently disunited by practice thought really 
unifies \ and this real unification is what I have wished 
to inculcate, without the pedantic idea ever passing 
through my mind of dictating rules for composing 
books, as to which it is desirable to leave all liberty of 
inclusion and exclusion to writers, in conformity with 
their various intentions. 



II 

GR^CO-ROMAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 

AFTER what we have said as to the nature of 
periodization,! the usual custom, to which I too 
^bow here, of beginning the history of historio- 
graphy with that of the Greeks, and with the Greeks of 
the fifth or sixth century before Christ, will be taken for 
what it is really worth, but it must not be thought that we 
thus intend to announce the beginning of historiography, 
its first appearance in the world, when, on the contrary, 
ail we wish to say is that our interest in the investigation 
of its course becomes more vivid at that point. History, 
like philosophy, has no historical beginning, but only 
an ideal or metaphysical beginning, in so far as it is an 
activity of thought, which is outside time. Historically 
speaking, it is quite clear that prior to Herodotus, prior 
to the logographs, prior indeed to Hesiod and to Homer, 
history was already, because it is impossible to conceive 
of men who do not think and do not narrate their deeds 
in some way or other. This explanation might seem 
to be superfluous if the confusion between historical 
beginning and ideal beginning had not led to the fancy 
of a * first philosophical step,' made by Thales or Zeno, 
or by somebody else, by means of which thinking the 
first stone is supposed to have been laid, as it was 
believed that by thinking another last step the pinnacle 
of the edifice of philosophy was or would be attained. 
But Thales and Herodotus should really be called rather 
the * sons ' of our interest in the development of those 

^ See pp. 1 1 2-1 1 6. 

i8i 



1 82 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

disciplines than the ' fathers ' of philosophy and history, 
and it is we whom those sons salute as their ' fathers.' 
We have not usually much interest in what occurred 
prior to them or among people more distant than they 
from our point of view, not only because there is a 
scarcity of surviving documents concerning them, but 
above all because they are forms of thought which have 
but little connexion with our own actual problems. 

From its point of view, too, the distinction that 
we laid down between history and philology suggests 
refraining from the search hitherto made for the begin- 
nings of Grasco-Roman historiography by means of 
composing lists of magistrates and of adding to these 
brief mention of wars, treatises, embassies from colonies, 
religious festivities, earthquakes, inundations, and the 
like, in the wpot and in the annates pontificum, in archives 
and museums made in temples, or indeed in the chrono- 
logical nails fixed to the walls, spoken of by Perizonius. 
Such things are extrinsic to historiography and form 
the precedent, not of it, but of chronicle and philology, 
which were not born for the first time in the nineteenth 
or seventeenth century, or at any rate during the 
Alexandrine period, but belong to all times, for in 
all times men take note of what they remember and 
attempt to preserve such memorials intact, to restore 
and to increase them. The precedent of history cannot 
be something different from history, but is history itself, 
as philosophy is the precedent of philosophy and the 
living of the living. Nevertheless the thought of 
Herodotus and of the logographs really does unite 
itself with religions, myths, theogonies, cosmogonies, 
genealogies, and with legendary and epical tales, which 
were not indeed poetry, or were not only poetry but 
also thoughts — that is to say, metaphysics and histories. 



GR^CO-ROMAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 183 

The whole of later historiography developed from 
them by a dialectical process, for which they supplied 
the presuppositions — ^that is to say, concepts, proposi- 
tions of fact and fancy mingled, and with that the stimulus 
better to seek out the truth and to dissipate fancies. 
This dissipation took place more rapidly at the time 
which it is usual to fix by convention as the beginning 
of Greek historiography. 

At that time thought deserts mythological history 
and its ruder form, prodigious or miraculous history, 
and enters earthly or human history — that is to say, the 
general conception that is still ours, so much so that it 
has been possible for an illustrious living historian to 
propose the works of Thucydides as an example and 
model to the historians of our times. Certainly that 
exit and that entrance did not represent for the Greeks 
a complete breaking with the past; and since earthly 
history could not have been altogether wanting in the 
past, so it is not to be believed that the Greeks from 
the sixth and seventh centuries onward should have 
abandoned all faith in mythology and prodigies. These 
things persisted not only with the people and among 
lesser or vulgar historiographers, but also left their traces 
among some of the greatest. Nevertheless, looking at the 
whole from above, as one should look at it, it is evident 
that the environment is altogether changed from what 
it was. Even the many fables that we read in Herodotus, 
and which were to be read in the logographs, are rarely 
(as has been justly observed) put forward ingenuously, 
but are usually given as by one who collects what others 
believe, and does not for that reason accept those beliefs, 
even if he does not openly evince his disbelief; or 
he collects them because he does not know what to 
substitute for them, and rather as matter for reflection 



1 84 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

and inquiry : qua nee confirmare argumentis neque 
refellere in animo est, as Tacitus says, when he recounts 
the fables of the Germans : plura transcriho quam credo^ 
declared Quintus Curtius. Herodotus is certainly not 
Voltaire, nor is he indeed Thucydides (Thucydides, 
* the atheist ') ; but certainly he is no longer Homer or 
Hesiod. 

The following are a few examples of leading problems 
which ancient historians had before them, dictated by 
the conditions and events of Greek and Roman life ; 
they were treated from a mental point of view, which 
no longer found in those facts episodes of the rivalry 
of Aphrodite and Hera (as formerly in the Trojan War), 
but varying complex human struggles, due to human 
interests, expressing themselves in human actions. 
How did the wars between the Greeks and the Persians 
originate and develop ? What were the origins of the 
Peloponnesian War ? of the expedition of Cyrus 
against Artaxerxes ? How was the Roman power 
formed in Latium, and how did it afterward extend in 
Italy and in the whole world ? How did the Romans 
succeed in depriving the Carthaginians of the hegemony 
of the Mediterranean ? What were the political institu- 
tions developed in Athens, Rome, and Sparta, and what 
form did the social struggle take in those cities ? What 
did the Athenian demos, the Roman -plebs, the eupatrides, 
and the patres desire ? What were the virtues, the 
dispositions, the points of view, of the various peoples 
which entered into conflict among themselves, Athenians, 
Lacedemonians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Gauls, 
and Germans ? What were the characters of the great 
men who guided the destinies of the peoples, Themis- 
tocles, Pericles, Alexander, Hannibal, and Scipio ? 

These problems were solved in a series of classical 



GR^CO-ROMAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 185 

works by Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Livy, 
Tacitus, etc., and they will certainly not be blamed for 
failing to exhaust their themes — that is, for failing to 
sound the bottom of the universe, because there is no 
sounding the bottom of the universe — nor because they 
solve those problems only in the terms in which they 
had proposed them, neither more nor less than as we 
solve the problems of our day in our own terms. Nor 
must we forget that since modern historiography is 
still much as it was left by the Greeks, the greater part 
of those events are still thought as they were by the 
ancients, and although something has been added and 
a different light illumines the whole, the work of the 
ancient historians is preserved in our own : a true 
"eternal possession," as Thucydides intended that his 
history should be. 

And just as historical thought had become invigorated 
in its passage from the mythological to the human stage, 
so did research and philology grow. Herodotus was 
already travelling, asking questions, and listening to 
answers, distinguishing between the things that he had 
seen with his own eyes and those which depended upon 
hearsay, opinion, and conjecture ; Thucydides was 
submitting to criticism different traditions relating to 
the same fact, and even inserting documents in his 
narrative. Later appeared legions of learned men and 
critics, who compiled * antiquities ' and * libraries,' 
and busied themselves also with the reading of texts, 
with chronology and geography, thus affording great 
assistance to historical studies. Such a fervour of 
philological studies was eventually attained that it was 
recognized as necessary to draw a clear distinction 
between the ' histories of antiquaries ' (of which a 
considerable number survive either entire or in fragments) 



1 86 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

and ' histories of historians,' and Polybius several times 
said that it is easy to compose history from books, 
because it suffices to take up one's residence in a city 
where there exist rich libraries, but that true history 
requires acquaintance with political and military affairs 
and direct knowledge of places and of people ; and 
Lucian repeated that it is indispensable for the historian 
to have political sense, dSiSaKrov (fiva-iax; Scjpov, a gift 
of nature not to be learned (the maxims and practices 
praised as quite novel by Moser and Niebuhr are there- 
fore by no means new). The fact is that a more profound 
theoretical consciousness corresponded with a more 
vigorous historiography, so inseparable is the theory of 
history from history, advancing with it. It was also 
known that history should not be made a simple in- 
strument of practice, of political intrigue, or of amuse- 
ment, and that its function is above all to aim at truth : 
ne quid falsi dicere audeat, ne quid veri non audeat. In 
consequence of this, partisanship, even for one's own 
country, was condemned (although it was recognized 
that solicitude and sympathy were permissible); and quid- 
quid Gracia mendax audet in historia was blamed. It 
was known that history is not chronicle (annales), which 
is limited to external things, recording (in the words of 
Asellio, the ancient Roman historian) quod factum, 
quoque anno gestum sit^ whereas history tries to understand 
quo consilioj quaque ratione gesta sint. And it was also 
known that history cannot set herself the same task as 
poetry. We find Thucydides referring with disdain to 
histories written with the object of gaining the prize in 
oratorical competitions, and to those which indulge in 
fables to please the vulgar. Polybius too inveighed 
against those who seek to emphasize moving details, 
and depict women dishevelled and in tears, and dreadful 



GR^CO-ROMAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 187 

scenes, as though composing tragedies and as though 
it were their business to create the marvellous and 
pleasing and not impart truth and instruction. If it be a 
fact that rhetorical historiography (a worsening of the 
imaginative and poetic) abounded in antiquity and intro- 
duced its false gold even into some masterpieces, the 
general tendency of the better historians was to set 
themselves free of ornate rhetoricians and of cheap 
eloquence. But the ancient historians will never fail 
of lofty poetical power and elevation for this reason 
(not even the * prosaic ' Polybius, who sometimes paints 
most effective pictures), but will ever retain what is proper 
to lofty historical narrative. Cicero and Quintilian, 
Diogenes and Lucian, all recognize that history must 
adopt verba ferme poetarum, that it is proxima poetis et 
quodammodo carmen solutum, that scrihitur ad narrandum^ 
non ad demonstrandum^ that e%ei tl itoi'^tikov, and the 
like. What the best historians and theorists sought 
at that time was not the aridity and dryness of mathema- 
tical or physical treatment (such as we often hear desired 
in our day), but gravity, abstention from fabulous and 
pleasing tales, or if not from fabulous then from frivolous 
tales, in fact from competition with the rhetoricians and 
composers of histories that were romances or gross 
caricatures of such. Above all they desired that 
history should remain faithful to real life, since it is 
the instrument of life, and a form of knowledge useful 
to the statesman and to the lover of his country, and by 
no means docile to the capricious requirements of the 
unoccupied seeking amusement. 

This theory of historiography, which may be found 
here and there in a good many special treatises and in 
general treatises on the art of speech, finds nowhere such 
complete and conscious expression as in the frequent 



1 88 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

polemical interludes of Polybius in his Histories, where the 
polemic itself endows it with precision, concreteness, and 
savour. Polybius is the Aristotle of ancient historio- 
graphy : an Aristotle who is both historical and theoreti- 
cal, completing the Stagirite, who in the vast expanse of 
his work had taken but little interest in history properly 
so called. And since so great a part of the ancient narra- 
tives lives in our own, so there is not one of the pro- 
positions recorded that has not been included and has 
not been worthy of being included in our treatises. And 
if, for example, the maxim that history should be narrated 
by men of the world and not by the simply erudite or 
by philologists, that it is born of practice and assists in 
practice, has been often neglected, the blame falls on 
those who neglect it. A further blunder committed 
by such writers has been to forget completely the 
Tt TToirjTLKov and to pay court to an ideal of history 
something like an anatomical map or a treatise of 
mechanics. 

But the defect that ancient historiography exposes to 
our gaze is of another sort. The ancients did not 
observe it as a defect, or only sometimes, in a vague and 
fugitive manner, without attaching weight to it, for 
otherwise they would have remedied it when it occurred. 
The modern spirit inquires how the sentiments and 
conceptions which are now our ideal patrimony, and 
the institutions in which they are realized, have been 
gradually formed. It wishes to understand the revo- 
lutionary passages from primitive and Oriental to Gr^co- 
Roman culture, how modern ethic was attained through 
ancient ethic, the modern through the ancient state, the 
vast industry and international commerce of the modern 
world through the ancient mode of economic production, 
the passage from the myths of the Aryans to our philo- 



GR^CO-ROMAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 189 

Sophies, from Mycenean to French or Swedish or 
Italian art of the twentieth century. Hence there are 
special histories of culture, of philosophy, of poetry, of 
the sciences, of technique, of economy, of morality, of 
religions, and so on, which are preferred to histories of 
individuals or of states themselves, in so far as they are 
abstract individuals. They are illuminated and inspired 
throughout with the ideas of liberty, of civilization, of 
humanity, and of progress. All this is not to be found 
in ancient historiography, although it cannot be said to 
be altogether absent, for with what could the mind of 
man have ever been occupied, save by human ideals or 

* values * ? Nor should the error be made of considering 

* epochs ' as something compact and static, whereas they 
are various and in motion, or of rendering those divisions 
natural and external which, as has been demonstrated, 
are nothing but the movement of our thought as we 
think history, a fallacy linked with the other one concern- 
ing the absolute beginning of history and the rendering 
temporal of the forms of the spirit. Whoever is gifted 
with the patience of the collector will meet here and there 
with suggestions and buddings of those historiographical 
conceptions of which, generally speaking, we have denied 
the existence in the writings of the ancients. He who 
finds diversion in modernizing the old may travesty the 
thoughts of the ancients, as they have been travestied, 
so as to render them almost altogether similar to those 
of the moderns. In the first book of Aristotle's Meta- 
physics^ for instance, is to be admired a sketch of the 
development of Greek philosophy, of the various 
naturalistic interpretations which have been in turn 
proposed for the explanation of the cosmos, and so on, 
up to the new orientation of the mind, when, " compelled 
by truth itself," it turned toward a different order of 



I90 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

principles — that is to say, till the time of Anaxagoras, 
"who seems to be a sober man among the intoxicated," 
thus continuing up to the time of Socrates, who founded 
ethic and discovered the universal and the definition. A 
sketch of the history of civilization is to be found at 
the beginning of the History of Thucydides, and Polybius 
will be found discoursing of the progress that had been 
made in all the arts, while Cicero, Quintilian, and several 
others trace the progress of rights and of literature. 
There are also touches of human value in conflict with 
one another in the narratives of the struggles between 
Greeks and barbarians, between the truly civil and active 
life of the former and the proud, lazy habits of the latter. 
Other similar conceptions of human values will be found 
in many comparisons of peoples, and above all in the 
way that Tacitus describes the Germans as a new moral 
power rising up against that of ancient Rome, and 
perhaps also in the repugnance which the same historian 
experiences at seeing before him the Jews, who follow 
rites contrarios ceteris mortalihus. Finally, Rome, mistress 
of the world, will sometimes assume in our eyes the 
aspect of a transparent symbol of the human ideal, 
analogous to Roman law, gradually idealized in the 
form of natural law. But here it is rather a question 
of symbols than of conceptions, of our own conclusions 
than of the thoughts proper to the ancients. When, 
for instance, we examine the history of philosophy of 
Aristotle as outlined by him, we find that it consists 
above all in a rapid critical account to serve as propaedeutic 
to his system ; and literary and artistic histories and 
histories of civilization seem often to be weakened by 
the prejudice that these are not really necessary mental 
forms, but luxuries and refinements. At the utmost 
we can speak of exceptions, incidents, tentatives; which 



GRiECO-ROMAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 191 

does not in any way alter the comprehensive impression 
and general conclusion to the effect that the ancients 
never possessed explicit histories of civilization, 
philosophy, religions, literature, art, or rights: none, 
in fact, of the many possessed by ourselves. Nor did 
they possess * biography ' in the sense that we do, as 
the history of the ideal function of an individual in his 
own time and in the life of humanity, nor the sense of 
development, and when they speak of primitive times 
they rarely feel that they are primitive, but are rather 
disposed to transfigure them poetically, in the same way 
that Dante did by the mouth of Cacciaguida that Fiorenza 
which " stood soberly and modestly at peace " within 
the circle of the ancient days. It was one of the " severe 
labours " of our Vico to recover the crude reality of history 
beneath these poetic idylls. In this work he was assisted, 
not by the ancient historiographers, but by documents 
and mostly by languages. 

The physiognomy of the histories of the ancients as 
described very accurately reflects the character of their 
philosophy, which never attained to the conception of 
the spirit, and therefore also failed to attain to that of 
humanity, liberty, and progress, which are aspects or 
synonyms of the former. It certainly passed from 
physiology or cosmology to ethic, logic, and rhetoric; 
but it schematized and materialized these spiritual 
disciplines because it treated them empirically. Thus 
their ethic did not rise above the custom of Greece 
and Rome, nor their logic above abstract forms of 
reasoning and discussing, nor their poetic above classes 
of literature. For this reason all assume the form of 
precepts. ' Anti-historical philosophy ' has been univer- 
sally recognized and described, but it is anti-historical 
because anti-spiritual, anti-historical because naturalistic. 



192 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

The ancients also failed to notice the deficiency observed 
by us, for they were entirely occupied with the joy of 
the effort of passing from myth to science and thus to 
the collection and classification of the facts of reality. 
That is to say, they were engrossed upon the sole problem 
which they set themselves to solve, and solved so success- 
fully that they supplied naturalism with the instruments 
which it still employs : formal logic, grammar, the 
doctrine of the virtues, the doctrine of literary classes, 
categories of civil rights, and so forth. These were 
all Graeco-Roman creations. 

But that ancient historians and philosophers were 
not explicitly aware of the above defect in its proper 
terms, or rather in our modern terms, does not mean 
that they were not to some extent exercised by it. In 
every historical period exist problems theoretically 
formulated and for that very reason solved, while 
others have not yet arrived at complete theoretical 
maturity, but are seen, intuited, though not yet adequately 
thought. If the former are the positive contribution 
of that time to the chain whose links form the human 
spirit, the latter represent an unsatisfied demand, which 
binds that time in another way to the coming time. 
The great attention paid to the negative aspect of every 
epoch sometimes leads to the forgetting of the other 
aspect, and to the consequent imagining of a humanity 
that passes not from satisfaction to satisfaction through 
dissatisfaction, but from dissatisfaction to dissatisfaction 
and from error to error. But obscurities and discord- 
ances are possible in so far as light and concord have 
been previously attained. Thus they represent in their 
way progress, as is to be seen from the history that we 
are recounting, where we find them very numerous for 
the very reason that the age of mythologies and of 



GR^CO-ROMAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 193 

prodigies has been left behind. If Greece and Rome 
had not been both more than Greece and more than 
Rome, if they had not been the human spirit, which 
is infinitely greater than any Greece and any Rome — its 
transitory individuations — they would have been satis- 
fied with the human portraits of their historians and 
would not have sought beyond. But they did seek 
beyond — that is to say, those very historians and philo- 
sophers sought ; and since they had before them so 
many episodes and dramas of human life, reconstructed 
by their thought, they asked themselves what was the 
cause of those events, reasonably concluding that such 
a cause might be one fact or another, a particular fact ; 
and for this reason they began to distinguish between 
facts and causes, and, in the order of causes themselves, 
between cause and occasion, as does Thucydides, or 
between beginning, cause, and occasion apxr], alria^ 
irpo^aac';), like Polybius. They thus became involved 
in disputes as to the true cause of this or that event, 
and ever since antiquity attempts have been made 
to solve the enigma of the * greatness ' of Rome, 
assuming in modern times the guise of a solemn experi- 
mentum of historical thought and thus forming the 
diversion of those historians who linger behind. The 
question was often generalized in the other question 
as to the motive power behind all history ; and here 
too appear doctrines, afterward drawn out to great 
length, such as that the form of the political constitution 
was the cause of all the rest, and that other doctrine 
relating to climate and to the temperaments of peoples. 
The doctrine principally proposed and accepted was 
that of the natural law of the circle in human affairs, 
the perpetual alternation of good and evil, or the passage 
through political forms, which always returns to the 



194 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

form from which it has taken its start, or as growth 
from infancy to manhood, declining into old age and 
decrepitude and ending in death. But a law of this 
sort, which satisfied and still satisfies the Oriental mind, 
did not satisfy the classical mind, which had a lively 
sense of human efTbrt and of the stimulus received from 
obstacles encountered and conflicts endured. Hence 
therefore the further questions : Does fate or immutable 
necessity oppress man, or is he not rather the plaything 
of capricious fortune, or is he ruled by a wise and 
sagacious providence ? It was also asked whether the 
gods are interested in human affairs or not. These 
questions met with answers that are sometimes pious, 
advocating submission to the divine will and wisdom, 
sometimes, again, inspired with the notion that the gods 
are not concerned with human affairs themselves, but 
solely with vengeance and punishment. All these 
conceptions lack firmness, and are for the most part 
confused, since a general uncertainty and confession of 
ignorance prevails in them : in incerto judicium est^ 
said Tacitus, almost summing up the ancient argument 
on the subject in this epigram, or rather finding non- 
thought, failure to understand, to be the result of the 
argument. 

What we do not understand we do not dominate; 
on the contrary, it dominates us, or at least menaces 
us, taking the form of evil; hence the psychological 
. attitude of the ancients toward history must be 
described as pessimistic. They saw much greatness 
fall, but they never discovered the greatness that does 
not fall and that rises up greater after every fall. 
For this reason a flood of bitterness inundates their ' 
histories. Happiness, beauty of human life, always 
seemed to be something that had been and was no 



GR^CO-ROMAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 195 

longer, and were it present would have soon been lost. 
For the Romans and those professing the cult of Rome, 
it was primitive, austere, victorious Rome ; and all the 
Roman historians, big and little, Livy, Sallust, and 
Tacitus, Paterculus and Florus, fix their gaze upon 
that image, as they lament the corruption of later days. 
Once it was Rome that trampled the world underfoot; 
but they knew that the triumphant queen must some 
day become slave from queen that once she was. This 
thought manifests itself in the most various forms, 
from the melancholy meditations of Scipio upon the 
ruins of Carthage to the fearful expectation of the 
lordship which — as Persia to Babylonia and Macedonia 
to Persia — must succeed to that of the Romans (the 
theory of the ' four monarchies ' has its origin in the 
Graeco-Roman world, whence it filtered into Palestine 
and into the Book of Daniel). Sometimes repressed, 
sometimes outspoken, we hear the anxious question : 
Who will be the successor and the gravedigger ? Will 
it be the menacing Parthian ? Will it be the Germans, 
so rich in new and mysterious energy ? — all this, despite 
the proud consciousness of ancient times that had uttered 
the words " Rome, the eternal city." Certainly, that 
general pessimism is not altogether coherent, for no 
pessimism can be so altogether, and here and there 
appear fugitive hints of a perception of human progress 
in this or that part of life. We find, for instance, 
Tacitus, bitterest of men, remarking that nee omnia 
apud priores meliora, sed nostra quoque <etas multa laudis 
et artium imitanda tulit^ and one of the speakers in the 
De oratorihus observes that literary forms change with 
the times and that it is owing to the vitio malignitatis 
humance that we hear the perpetual praise of ancient 
things and the perpetual abuse of things modern. 



196 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

Another interlocutor in the same dialogue draws attention 
to the dialectic connexion between the turbulence of 
life and the greatness of art, whence Rome donee erravit^ 
donee se ■partibus et dissenstonihus confecit, precisely at that 
time tulit valentiorem eloquentiam. This linking together 
of good and evil is not altogether absent in ancient 
philosophy, and is also to be found here and there in 
ancient historiography. Sallust, for example, is of opinion 
that Rome remained in good health so long as she 
had Carthage opposed to her and giving her trouble. 
Readers of Cicero and of Seneca will be aware that 
the idea of humanity also made considerable progress 
during the last days of the Republic and the first days 
of the Empire, owing to the influence of Stoicism. 
Divine providence too is courted, as was not formerly 
the case, and we also find Diodorus Siculus undertaking 
to treat the affairs of all nations as those of a single 
city {KaBairep \xia<i iroXkai). But these promises remain 
still weak, vague, and inert (the promissor Diodorus, for 
example, carried out none of his grandiose prologue), 
and in any case they foretell the dissolution of the 
classical world. During this epoch the problem as to the 
signification of history remains unsolved, because the con- 
tradictory conceptions above mentioned of fortune or of 
the gods, the belief in a universal worsening of things, 
in a fall or a regression, which had already been expressed 
in many ancient myths, were not by any means solutions. 
Owing to their failure to realize spiritual value as the 
immanent progressive force in history, even the loftiest 
of the ancient historians were not able to maintain the 
unity and autonomy of historiographical work, which 
in other respects they had discovered and asserted. 
Although they had penetrated the deception exercised 
by those histories that are really poetry, or lies and 



GR^CO-ROMAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 197 

partisanship, or collections of material and unintelligent 
piling up of erudition, or instruments of pleasure, 
affording marvel for simple folk, yet they were on the 
other hand incapable of ever setting themselves free of 
the preconception of history as directed to an end of 
edification and chiefly of instruction. This real hetero- 
nomy then appeared to be autonomy. They are all 
agreed as to this : Thucydides proposed to narrate 
past events in order to predict from them future events, 
identical or similar, the perpetual return of human 
fortunes ; Polybius sought out the causes of facts in 
order that he might apply them to analogous cases, and 
held those unexpected events to be of inferior importance 
whose irregularities place them outside rules ; Tacitus, 
in conformity with his chief interest, which was rather 
moralistic than social or political, held his chief end to 
be the collection of facts notable for the vice or virtue 
which they contained, ne virtutes sileantur utque pravis dictis 
jactisque ex -posteritate et infamia metus sit. Behind them 
came all the minor historians, all the hypocrites, who re- 
peated by imitation or involuntary echo or false unction 
and in a superficial way what in the greater writers 
was the result of profound thought, as, for instance, the 
Sallusts, the Diogenes, the Diodori, the Plutarchs, and 
those that resemble them. Then there were all the ex- 
tractors of historical quintessences, of memorable deeds 
and words of statesmen, captains, and philosophers, and 
even of women (the 7waiA:wz/ aperat). Ancient historio- 
graphy has been called ' pragmatical,' and such it is, in 
the double sense of the word, ancient and modern : in so 
far as it limits itself to the earthly side of things and 
especially to the political (the * pragmatic ' of Polybius), 
and in so far as it adorns them with reflections and advice 
(the * apodictic ' of the same historian-theorist). 



198 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

This heteronomous theory of history does not always 
remain merely theory, prologue, or frame, but some- 
times operates so as to lead to the mingling of elements 
that are not historiographical with history, such as, for 
instance, is the case with the * speeches ' or ' orations ' of 
historical personages, not delivered or not in agreement 
with what was really said, but invented or arranged by 
the historian and put into the mouths of the personages. 
This, in my opinion, has been wrongly looked upon as 
a survival of the * epic spirit ' in ancient historiography, 
or as a simple proof of the rhetorical ability of the 
narrators, because, if the first explanation hold as to 
some of the popular writers and the second as to certain 
rhetoricians, the origin of those falsifications was with 
the greater historians nothing but the fulfilment of the 
obligation of teaching and counselling accepted by them. 
But when such ends had been assigned to history, its 
intrinsic quality of truth and the line of demarcation which 
it drew between real and imaginary could not but vacil- 
late to some extent, since the imaginary sometimes served 
excellently well and even better than the real for those 
ends. And setting aside Plato, who despised all knowledge 
save that of the transcendental ideas, did not Aristotle 
himself ask whether the greater truth belonged to 
history or to poetry ? Had he not indeed said that 
history is ' less philosophical * than poetry ? And if so 
why should not history have availed itself of the aid 
of poetry and of imagination ? In any case, resistance 
could be opposed to this ulterior perversion by seeking 
the truth with vigilant eye, and also by reducing the 
share of the imaginary speeches and other parerga 
to the smallest dimensions. But it was impossible to 
dispense with belief in the end of instruction, because 
it was in any case necessary that history should have 



GRiECO-ROMAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 199 

some end, and a true end had not been discovered, and 
the end of instruction performed almost the function 
of a metaphor of the truth, since it was to some extent 
the nearest to the truth. In Polybius critical vigilance, 
scientific austerity, a keen desire for ample and severe 
history, attain to so high a level that one would feel 
disposed to treat the historian of Megalopolis like one 
of those great pagans that medieval imagination admitted 
to Paradise, or at least to Purgatory, as worthy of having 
known the true God by extraordinary means and as a 
reward for their intense moral conscience. But if we 
envisage the matter with greater calmness we shall have 
to consign Polybius also to the Limbo where those who 
"were before Christianity" and "did not duly adore 
God " are received. They were men of great value 
and reached the boundary, even touching it, but they 
never passed beyond. 



Ill 

MEDIEVAL HISTORIOGRAPHY 

FOR the same reason that we must not look upon 
the beginning of any history as an absolute 
beginning, or conceive of epochs in a simplicistic 
manner, as though they were strictly limited to the 
determinations represented by their general character, 
we must be careful not to identify the humanistic 
conception of history with the ancient epoch of historio- 
graphy which it characterizes or symbolizes — in fact, 
we must not make historical the ideal categories, which 
are eternal. Graeco-Roman historiography was without 
doubt humanistic, but it was a Grseco-Roman humanism 
— that is to say, it not only had all the limitations that we 
have been pointing out, but also the special physiognomy 
which such humanism assumes in the ancient historians 
and thinkers, varying more or less in each one of them. 
Not only was it thus humanistic, but other formations 
of the same sort probably preceded, as they certainly 
followed, it in the course of the centuries. It is perhaps 
attractive, but it is also artificial (and contrary to the true 
concept of progress), to conceive of the history of philo- 
sophy and of historiography as of a series of ideal phases, 
which are traversed once only, and to transform philo- 
sophers into categories and categories into philosophers, 
making synonymous Democritus and the atom, Plato and 
the transcendental idea, Descartes and dualism, Spinoza 
and pantheism, Leibnitz and monadism, whittling down 
history to the dimensions of a Dynastengeschichte, as a 
German critic has satirically described it, or treating it 
200 



MEDIEVAL HISTORIOGRAPHY 201 

according to a sort of * line of buckets ' theory, as an 
Englishman has humorously described it. Hence, too, 
the view that history has not yet appeared in the world, 
or that it has appeared for the first time and by flashes, 
in response to the invocations made by the historian and 
the critic of the present day. But every thinking of his- 
tory is always adequate to the moment at which it appears 
and always inadequate to the moment that follows. 

The opportuneness of this warning is confirmed by the 
astonishment of those who consider the passage from 
ancient to Christian or medieval historiography ; for 
what can be the meaning of this passage, in which we 
find ourselves faced with a miraculous and mytholo- 
gical world all over again, identical as it seems, in its 
general characteristics, with that of the ancient historians, 
which has disappeared ? It is certainly not progress, 
but rather falling into a ditch, into which also fall all the 
dearest illusions relating to the perpetual advance of 
humanity. And the Middle Ages did seem to be a 
ditch or a declivity, sometimes during the period itself 
and most clearly at the Renaissance, and this image is 
still represented in common belief. Restricting our- 
selves solely to the domain of historiography, and 
following up the impression of astonishment at first 
caused by it, we end by representing events at the 
beginning of the Middle Ages somewhat in the way 
they appeared to our writer Adolfo Bartoli, in his 
introductory volume to the History of Italian Literature, 
which is all broken up with cries of horror and with the 
gesture of covering the face lest he should see so much 
ugliness. " We are in a world," writes Bartoli, when 
speaking of Gregory of Tours, " where thought has 
descended so low as to cause pity, in a world where a 
conception of history no longer exists," and history also 



202 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

becomes " a humble handmaid to theology — that is to 
say, an aberration of the spirit." And after Gregory of 
Tours (continues Bartoli) there is a further fall : " Behold 
Fredigarius, in whom credulity, ignorance, and con- 
fusion surpass every limit . . . there survives in him 
nothing of a previous civilization." After Fredigarius, 
with the monastic chronicle, we take another step down- 
ward toward nothingness, though this would seem to be 
impossible. Here " we seem to see the lean monk 
putting his trembling head out of the narrow window 
of his cell every five or eleven years, to make sure that 
men are not all dead, and then shutting himself up again 
in the prison, where he lives only in the expectation of 
death." We must protest against such shrinking back 
(which makes the critic of to-day look like the " lean 
monk " whose appearance he has so vividly portrayed) ; we 
must assert that mythology and miracle and transcendency 
certainly returned in the Middle Ages — that is to say, 
that these ideal categories again acted with almost equal 
force and that they almost reassumed their ancient 
bulk, but they did not return historically identical with 
those of the pre-Hellenic world. We must seek in 
the heart of their new manifestations for the effective 
progress which is certainly accomplished by Gregory 
of Tours and Fredigarius, and even by the monkish 
chroniclers. 

The divinity descends again to mingle anthropo- 
morphically with the affairs of men, as a most powerful 
or ultra-powerful personage among the less powerful ; 
the gods are now the saints, and Peter and Paul intervene 
in favour of this or that people ; St Mark, St Gregory, 
St Andrew, or St January lead the array of the combatants, 
the one vying with the other, and sometimes against the 
other, playing malicious tricks upon one another; and 



MEDIEVAL HISTORIOGRAPHY 203 

in the performance or the non-performance of an act of 
worship is again placed the loss or gain of a battle: 
medieval poems and chronicles are full of such stories. 
These conceptions are analogous to the antique, and 
indeed they are their historical continuation. This is 
not only so (as has so often been pointed out) owing to 
the attachment of this or that particular of ancient faith 
to popular religion and to the transformation of gods 
into saints and demons, but also, and above all, to 
a more substantial reason. Ancient thought had left 
fortune, the divinity, the inscrutable, at the edge of its 
humanism, with the result that the prodigious was never 
completely eliminated even from the most severe his- 
torians — the door at any rate was left open by which it 
could return. All are aware with how many * super- 
stitions * philosophy, science, history, and customs 
were impregnated during late antiquity, which in this 
respect was not intellectually superior, but indeed 
inferior, to the new Christian religion. In the latter 
the fables gradually formed and miracles which were 
believed became spiritualized and ceased to be ' super- 
stitions ' — that is to say, something extraneous or dis- 
cordant to the general humanistic conception — and set 
themselves in harmony with the new supernaturalistic 
and transcendental conception, of which they were the 
accompaniment. Thus myth and miracle, becoming 
intensified in Christianity, became at the same time 
different from ancient myths and miracles. 

They were different and more lofty, because they con- 
tained a more lofty thought: the thought of spiritual 
worth, which was not peculiar to this or to that people, 
but common to the whole of humanity. The ancients had 
indeed touched upon this thought in speculation, but they 
had never possessed it, and their philosophers had sought 



204 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

it in vain or attained to it only in abstract speculation not 
capable of investing the whole soul, as is the case with 
thoughts that are profoundly thought, and as was the 
case with Christianity. Paulus Orosius expresses this 
in his Historice adversus paganos^ in such accents as 
no Graeco-Roman historian had been able to utter : 
Ubique patria, uhique lex et religio mea est. . . . hatitudo 
orientis^ septentrionis copiositas, meridiana diffusio^ mag- 
narum insularum largissim^ tutissimaque sedes met juris 
et nominis sunt, quia ad Christianas et Romanos Romanus et 
Christianus accedo. To the virtue of the citizen is added 
that of man, of spiritual man, who puts himself on a 
level with the truth by means of his religious faith and 
by his work, which is humanly good. To the illustrious 
men among the pagans are opposed illustrious men among 
the Christians who are better than illustrious, being 
saints ; and the new Plutarch is found in the Vita 
patrum or eremitarum, in the lives of the confessors 
of Christ, of the martyrs, of the propagators of the 
true faith ; the new epics describe the conflicts of 
the faithful against unbelievers, of Christians against 
heretics and Islamites. There is here a greater con- 
sciousness of conflict than the Greeks had of the conflict 
between Greeks and barbarians, or freedmen and slaves, 
which were usually looked upon rather as representing 
diff'erences of nature than of spiritual values. Eccle- 
siastical history now appears, no longer that of Athens or 
of Rome, but of religion and of the Church which 
represented it in its strifes and in its triumphs — that is 
to say, the strifes and triumphs of the truth. This was 
a thing without precedent in the ancient world, whose 
histories of culture, of art or philosophy, did not go 
beyond the empirical stage, as we have seen, whereas 
ecclesiastical history has a spiritual value as its subject. 



MEDIEVAL HISTORIOGRAPHY 205 

by means of which it illuminates and judges facts. 
To censure ecclesiastical history because it overrules and 
oppresses profane history will perhaps be justified, as 
we shall see, from certain points of view and in a certain 
sense ; but it is not justifiable as a general criticism of 
the idea of that history, and, indeed, when we formulate 
the censure in these terms we are unconsciously pro- 
nouncing a warm eulogy of it. The historia spiritalis 
(as we may also call it, employing the title of Avito's 
poem) could not and in truth would not consent to 
be a mere part, or to suffer rivals at its side : it 
must dominate and affirm itself as the whole. And 
since history becomes history of the truth with Chris- 
tianity, it abandons at the same time the fortuitous and 
chance, to which the ancients had often abandoned it, 
and recognizes its own proper law, which is no longer a 
natural law, blind fate, or even the influence of the stars 
(St Augustine confutes this doctrine of the pagans), 
but rationality, intelligence, providence. This conception 
was not unknown to ancient philosophy, but is now set 
free from the frost of intellectualism and abstractionism 
and becomes warm and fruitful. Providence guides 
and disposes the course of events, directing them to an 
end, permitting evils as punishments and as instruments 
of education, determining the greatness and the cata- 
strophes of empires, in order to prepare the kingdom of 
God. This means that for the first time is really broken 
the idea of the circle, of the perpetual return of human 
affairs to their starting-point, of the vain labour of the 
Danaids (St Augustine also combats the circuitus) ; 
history for the first time is here understood as progress : 
a progress that the ancient historians did not succeed 
in discovering, save in rare glimpses, thus falling into 
unconsolable pessimism, whereas Christian pessimism 



2o6 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

is irradiated with hope. Hence the importance to be 
attributed to the succession of empires and to the function 
fulfilled by each of them, and especially with regard to 
the Roman Empire, which politically unified the world 
that Christ came to unify spiritually, to the position 
of Judaism as opposed to Christianity, and the like. 
These questions have been answered in various ways, 
but on the common assumption that divine intelligence 
had willed those events, that greatness and that decadence, 
those joys and afflictions, and therefore that all had been 
necessary means of the divine work, and that all had 
competed in and were competing in the final end of 
history, linked one with the other, not as effects following 
from a blind cause, but as stages of a process. Hence, 
too, history understood as universal history, no longer in 
the sense of Polybius, who narrates the transactions of 
those states which enter into relations with one another, 
but in the profounder sense of a history of the universal, 
of the universal by excellence, which is history in 
labour with God and toward God. By means of this 
spirit which invests them, even the most neglected of 
the chronicles become surrounded with a halo, which is 
wanting to the classical histories of Greece and Rome, 
and which, however distant they be from our particular 
view-points, yet in their general aspect makes them very 
near to our heart and mind. 

Such are the new problems and the new solutions 
which Christianity brought to historical thought, and it 
may be said of them, as of the political and humanistic 
thought of the ancients, that they constitute a solid 
possession of perpetual efficacy for the human spirit. 
Eusebius of Cassarea is to be placed beside Herodotus 
as * father ' of modern historiography, however little 
disposed it may be to recognize its parents in that 



MEDIEVAL HISTORIOGRAPHY 207 

barbaric author and in the others who were called 
* fathers of the Church, ' to whom, and particularly to 
St Augustine, it yet owes so great a part of itself. What 
are our histories of culture, of civilization, of progress, 
of humanity, of truth, save the form of ecclesiastical 
history in harmony with our times — that is to say, of 
the triumph and propagation of the faith, of the strife 
against the powers of darkness, of the successive treat- 
ments of the new evangel, or good news, made afresh 
with each succeeding epoch ? Do not the modern 
histories, which narrate the function performed or the 
pre-eminence assumed by this or that nation in the work 
of civilization, correspond to the Gesta Dei per Francos 
and to other like formulas of medieval historiography ? 
And our universal histories are such not only in the 
sense of Polybius, but also of the universal as ideal, 
purified and elevated in the Christian sense; hence the 
religious sentiment which we experience on approaching 
the solemnity of history. 

It will be observed that in presenting it in this way 
we to some extent idealize the Christian conception ; 
and this is true, but in the same way and in the same 
measure as we have idealized ancient humanism, which 
was not only humanism, but also transcendency and 
mystery. Christian historiography, like ancient historio- 
graphy, solved the problems that were set to it, but it did 
not solve other problems that were only formed afterward, 
because they were not set to it. A proof of this is to 
be found in the caprices and the myths that accompanied 
its fundamental conception. The prodigious and the 
miraculous, which, as already observed, surrounded 
Christian historiography, bore witness precisely to the in- 
complete ideality of the new and loftier God, the thought 
of whom became converted into a myth, his action into 



2o8 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

fabulous anecdotes. Yet when it was not a question of 
miracles, or when these were reduced to small compass, 
attenuated and held back, if not refuted, there neverthe- 
less remained the miracle of the divinity and of the truth, 
conceived as transcendent, separated from and opposed 
to human affairs. This too was an attestation of the 
Christian spirit, in so far as it surpassed the ancient spirit, 
not with the calmness and security of thought, but with 
the violence of sentiment and with the enthusiasm of 
the imagination. Transcendency led to a consideration , 
of worldly things as external and rebellious to divine 
things : hence the dualism of God and the world, of a 
civitas ccelestis and of another that was terrena^ of a civitas 
Dei and of a civitas diaholi which revived most ancient 
Oriental conceptions, such as Parseeism, and was tem- 
pered, if not internally corrected, by means of the provi- 
dential course of history, internally compromised by 
that unconquered dualism. The city of God destroyed 
the earthly city and took its place, but did not justify it, 
although it tried to do so here and there, in accordance 
with the logic of its providential and progressive prin- 
ciple. St Augustine, obliged to explain the reasons 
of the fortune of Rome, escaped from the difficulty with 
the sophism that God conceded that greatness to the 
Romans as a reward for their virtues, earthly though 
they were and not such as to lead to the attainment of 
heavenly glories, but yet worthy the fleeting reward 
of earthly glory. Thus the Romans remained always 
reprobate, but less reprehensible than other repro- 
bates ; there could not have been true virtue where 
there had not been true religion. The contests of 
ideas did not appear as conflicting forms of the true in 
its becoming, but simply diabolical suggestions, which 
disturbed the truth, which was complete and possessed 



MEDIEVAL HISTORIOGRAPHY 209 

by the Church. Eusebius of Caesarea treated heresies 
as the work of the devil, because it was the devil who 
prompted Simon Magus, and then Menander, and the 
two currents of gnosis represented by Saturninus and 
Basil. Otto of Frisia contemplated the Roman Empire 
succeeding to the Babylonian as son to father, and the 
kings of the Persians and the Greeks almost as its tutors 
and pedagogues. In the political unity of Rome he 
discovers a prelude to Christian unity, in order that 
the minds of men should form themselves ad majora 
intelligenda promptiores et capaciores^ be disciplined to 
the cult of a single man, the emperor, and to the fear 
of a single dominant city, that they should learn unam 
quoque fidem tenendam. But the same Otto imagines 
the whole world a primo homine ad Christum . . . exceptis 
de Israelitico populo paucis, errore deceptus^ vanis super- 
stitionihus deditus^ d^emonum ludicris captus^ mundi illecehris 
irretitus^ fighting sub principe mundi diabolo^ until venit 
plenitudo temporis and God sent His son to earth. The 
doctrine of salvation as a grace due to the good pleasure 
of God, indehita Dei gratia^ is not at all an accidental 
excrescence upon this conception, but is its foundation 
or logical complement. Christian humanity was destined 
to make itself unhuman, and St Augustine, however 
much reverence he excites by the energy of his tem- 
perament, by his gaze ever fixed above, offends us to an 
equal degree by his lack of human sympathy, his harsh- 
ness and cruelty ; and the ' grace ' of which he speaks 
assumes in our eyes the aspect of odious favouritism and 
undue exercise of power. It is nevertheless well to re- 
member that by means of these oscillations and deviations 
of sentiment and imagination Christian historiography 
prepared the problem of the surpassing of dualism. 
For if the search for the Christianity of the non-Christians, 



2IO HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

for grace due to all men from their very character of 
men, the truth of heresies, the goodness of pagan 
virtue, was a historical task that has matured slowly in 
modern times, the division and opposition of the two 
histories and the two cities, introduced by Christianity, 
was a fundamental necessity, as their unity thought in 
the providential divine Unity was a good preparation 
for it. 

Another well-known aspect of this dualism is dog- 
matism^ the incapacity to understand the concrete 
particularization of itself by the spirit in its various 
activities and forms. This explains the accusation 
levelled against ecclesiastical history of overriding and 
tyrannically oppressing the whole of the rest of history. 
This did in fact take place, because ecclesiastical history, 
instead of developing itself in the concrete universal 
of the spirit, remained rooted in a particular deter- 
mination of it. All human values were reduced to 
a single value — that is to say, to firmness of Christian 
faith and to service of the Church. This value, thus 
abstractly conceived, became deprived of its natural 
virtue and declined to the level of a material and immo- 
bile fact, and indeed the vivid, fluid Christian conscious- 
ness after some centuries of development became 
solidified in dogmas. That materialized and motionless 
dogma necessarily prevailed as a universal measure, and 
men of all times were judged according to whether they 
had or had not been touched with the divine grace, 
were pious or impious, and the lives of the holy fathers 
and of believers were a Plutarch, who excluded every 
other profane Plutarch. This was the dogmatism of 
transcendency, which therefore resolved itself into 
asceticism^ in the name of which the whole actual his- 
tory of mankind is covered with contempt, with horror, 



MEDIEVAL HISTORIOGRAPHY 211 

and with lamentation. This is particularly noticeable in 
Augustine, in Orosius, and in Otto of Frisia, but is 
to be perceived at least in germ as a tendency among all 
the historians or chroniclers of the early Middle Ages. 
What thoughts are suggested by the battle of Ther- 
mopylae to Otto of Frisia ? T^det hie inextricabilem 
malorum texere cratem ; tamen ad ostendendam mortalium 
misenam^ summatim ea attingere volo. And what by the 
deeds of Alexander } Regni Macedonum monarchia, 
qua ah ipso ccepit^ ipso mortuo cum ipso finitur. . . . Civitas 
autem Christi firmata supra firmam petram. . . . With 
asceticism is linked the often noted and often ridiculed 
credulity of the medieval historians (not to be confounded 
with the belief in miracles, originating from religion) : 
this credulity is generally attributed to the prevalence 
of imagination, or to social conditions, which rendered 
books rare and critical capacity difficult to find — that is 
to say, to things which required to be explained in 
their turn. 

Indifference is, Indeed, one of the principal sources of 
credulity, because no one is ever credulous in the things 
that touch him closely and of which he treats, while 
on the other hand all (as is proved in daily life) are ready 
to lend an ear to more or less indifferent talk. Asceti- 
cism, diminishing the interest for things of the world 
and for history, assisted in the neglect and dispersion of 
books and documents, promoted credulity toward every- 
thing heard or read, unbridling the imagination, ever 
desirous of the wonderful and curious, to the disadvan- 
tage of discernment. It did this not only in history 
properly so called, but also in the science of nature or 
natural history, which was also indifferent to one 
who possessed the ultimate truth of religion. The weak 
capacity for individualization noticeable in medieval 



212 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

historiography must be attributed to ascetism, which is 
usually satisfied with the general character of goodness 
or badness (the ' portrait ' is very rare in it, as in the 
figurative arts of the same age), and it has even less 
consciousness of the historical differences of place and 
time, travestying persons and events in contemporary 
costume. It even goes so far as to compose imaginary 
histories and false documents, which portray the sup- 
posed type. This extends from Agnello of Ravenna, 
who declared that he wrote also the lives of those bishops 
of Ravenna about whom he possessed no information, 
et credo (he said) non mentitum esse^ because, if they 
filled so high a past, they must of necessity have 
been good, charitable, zealous, and so forth, down to 
the false decretals of the pseudo-Isidore. We also 
owe to asceticism the form of chronicle as its intimate 
cause, because, when the meaning of particular facts 
was neglected, it only remained to note them as they 
were observed or related, without any ideological 
connexion and with only the chronological connexion. 
Thus we frequently find among the historians of the 
Middle Ages the union (at first sight strange, yet not 
without logical coherence) of a grandiose history, 
beginning with the creation of the world and the dis- 
persion of the races, and an arid chronicle, following 
the other principle and becoming ever more particular 
and more contingent as approach is gradually made 
to the times of the authors. 

When on the one hand the two cities, the heavenly 
and the earthly, and on the other the transcendency of 
the principle of explanation had been conceived, the 
composition of dualism could not be sought for in 
intelligence, but in myth, which put an end to the 
strife with the triumph of one of the two adversaries : 



MEDIEVAL HISTORIOGRAPHY 213 

the myth of the fall, of the redemption, of the expected 
reign of Christ, of the Last Judgment, and of the final 
separation of the two cities, one ascending to Paradise 
with the elect, the other driven back into hell with the 
wicked. This mythology had its precedent in the 
Judaic expectations of a Messiah, and also, from some 
points of view, in Orphism, and continued to develop 
through gnosis, millenarism, and other heretical tenta- 
tives and heresies, until it took a definite or almost a 
definite form in St Augustine. It has been remarked 
that in this conception metaphysic became identified 
with history, as an entirely new thought, altogether 
opposed to Greek thought, and that it is a philosophical 
contribution altogether novel and proper to Christianity. 
But we must add here that, as mythology, it did not unite, 
but indeed confounded, metaphysic and history, making 
the finite infinite, avoiding the fallacy of the circle as 
perpetual return of things, but falling into the other 
fallacy of a progress beginning and ending in time. 
History was therefore arranged in spiritual epochs or 
phases, through which humanity was born, grew up, and 
attained completion : there were six, seven, or eight 
epochs, according to the various ways of dividing and 
calculating, which sometimes corresponded to the ages of 
human life, sometimes to the days of the creation, some- 
times to both these schemes combined ; or where the 
hermeneutic of St Jerome upon the Book of Daniel was 
accepted, the succession of events was distributed among 
the four monarchies^ of which the last was the Roman, 
not only in order of time, but also in that of the idea, 
because after the Roman Empire (the Middle Ages, as 
we know, long nourished the illusion that that empire 
persisted in the form of the Holy Roman Empire) there 
would be nothing else, and the reign of Christ or of the 



214 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

Church and then of Antichrist and the universal judg- 
ment were expected to follow without any intermission. 
The end which history had not yet reached chrono- 
logically, being also intrinsic to the system, was ideally 
constructive, as the Apocalypses had already ideally 
constructed it, pervading theological works and even 
histories, which in their last section (see the works of 
Otto of Frisia for all of them) described the coming of 
Antichrist and the end of the world : hence the 
idea of a history of things future, continued by the 
paradoxical Francesco Patrizzi, who gave utterance 
to his theory in the sixteenth century in his dialogues 
Upon History (1560). This general historical picture 
might be here and there varied in its particulars, but 
never shattered and confuted ; it varied in orthodoxy 
up to the time of Augustine, and afterward among the 
dissentients and the heretics : most noteworthy of these 
variations was the Eternal Evangel of the followers of 
Gioacchino di Flora, who divided history into three 
epochs, corresponding to the three persons of the 
Trinity : the first that of the Old Testament or of 
the Father, the second that of the New Testament or 
of the Son, the third and last, that of the Spirit. 
These are but artificial combinations and transactions, 
by means of which life always seeks to find a passage 
between the preconceived schemes which compress 
and threaten to suffocate it. 

But such transactions did not avail to get the 
better of the discord between reality and plan which 
everywhere revealed itself. Hence the necessity of the 
allegorical interpretation, so dear to the Middle Ages. 
This consisted substantially in placing an imaginary 
figure between the plan and the historical reality, a 
mixture of both, like a bridge, but a bridge which 



MEDIEVAL HISTORIOGRAPHY 215 

could be crossed only in imagination. Thus personages 
and events of sacred and profane history were alle- 
gorized, and subtle numerical calculations made and 
continually reinforced with new imaginary contributions, 
in order to discover correspondences and parallelisms; 
and not only were the ages of life and the days of creation 
placed on a parallel line with historical epochs, but so 
also were the virtues and other conceptions. Such notions 
are still to be found in books of devotion and in the 
preaching of the less acute and less modernized of 
sacred orators. The * reign of nature ' was also included 
in allegorical interpretation ; and since history and 
metaphysic had been set at variance with one another, so 
in like manner was natural science set at variance with 
both of them, and all appeared together in allegorical 
forms in the medieval encyclopaedias, the Pantheons and 
Mirrors of the World. 

Notwithstanding these inevitable strayings, the new 
idea of history as the spiritual drama of humanity, 
although it inclined toward myth, yet acted with such 
energy as to weaken the ancient heteronomous con- 
ception of history as directed toward the administration 
of abstract instruction, useful in actual practice. History 
itself was nov/ the teaching, the knowledge of the life 
of the human race from its creation upon the earth, 
through its struggles, up to its final state, which was 
indicated in the near or remote horizon. History thus 
became the work of God, teaching by His direct word 
and presence, which is to be seen and heard in every 
part of it. Declarations are certainly not wanting, 
indeed they abound, that the reading of histories is 
useful as counselling, and particularly as inculcating, 
good behaviour and abstention from evil. Sometimes 
it is a question of traditional and conventional declara- 



2i6 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

tions, at others of particular designs : but medieval 
historiography was not conceived, because it could not 
be conceived, heteronomously. 

If asceticism mortified minds, and if the miraculous 
clouded them, it is not necessary to believe, on the 
other hand, that either had the power to depress reality 
altogether and for a long period. Indeed, precisely 
because asceticism was arbitrary, and mythology ima- 
ginary, they remained more or less abstract, in the same 
way as allegorical interpretation, which was impotent 
to suppress the real determinations of fact. It was all 
very well to despise and condemn the earthly city in 
words, but it forced itself upon the attention, and if it 
did not speak to the intellect it spoke to the souls and 
to the passions of men. In its period of youthful 
vigour, also, Christianity was obliged to tolerate profane 
history, dictated by economic, political, and military 
interests, side by side with sacred history. And as in the 
course of the Middle Ages, in addition to the religious 
poetry of the sacred hymns and poems, there also existed 
an epic of territorial conquests, of the shock of peoples 
and of feudal strife, so there continued to exist a worldly 
history, more or less mingled and tempered with religious 
history. We find even fervent Christians and the most 
pious of priests yielding to the desire of collecting and 
handing down the memory of their race: thus Gregory 
of Tours told of the Franks, Paulus Diaconus of the 
Lombards, Bede of the Angles, Widekind of the Saxons. 
Their gentle hearts of political partisans do not cease to 
beat. Not only do they lament the misery and wicked- 
ness of humanity in general, but also give vent to their 
particular feelings, as we observe, for instance, in the 
monk Erchempertus, who, ex intimo corde ducens aha 
suspiria^ resumes the thread of Paul's history to narrate 



MEDIEVAL HISTORIOGRAPHY 217 

the deeds of his glorious Lombards (now hunted back 
into the southern part of Italy alone and assaulted and 
ambushed on every side), non regnum sed excidium^ non 
felicitatem sed miseriam, non triumphum sed ferniciem. 
And Liutprand of Cremona, although he makes the 
deity intervene as ruler and punisher on every occasion, 
and even the saints in person do battle, does not fail, for 
instance, to note that when Berengarius proceeded to 
take possession of the kingdom after the death of Guido, 
the followers of the latter called for King Lambert, quia 
semper Itali geminis uti dominis volunt^ quatinus alterum 
alterius terrore coherceant : which is also the definition 
of feudal society. They were most credulous in many 
things, far from profound and abandoned to their 
imagination, but they were not credulous, indeed they 
were clear-sighted, shrewd and diffident in what con- 
cerned the possessions and privileges of the churches 
and monasteries, of families, and of the feudal group 
and the order of citizenship to which each belonged. 
It is to these interests that we owe the formation 
of archives, registers, chronologies, and the exercise 
of criticism as to the authenticity and genuineness of 
documents. The conception of the new Christian virtue 
oppressed, but did not quench, admiration (though held 
sinful by the most severe) for the great name of 
ancient Rome, and the many works of pagan civilization, 
its eloquence, its poetry, its civil wisdom. Nor did it 
forbid admiration for Arabic or Judaic-Arabic wisdom, 
of which the works were well received, notwithstanding 
religious strife. Hence we may say that in the same 
way as Graeco-Roman humanism did not altogether 
exclude the supernatural, so the Christian supernatural 
did not prevent human consideration of worldly passions 
and earthly transactions. 



2i8 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

This becomes more and more evident as we pass from 
the early to the late Middle Ages, when profane historio- 
graphy progresses, as the result of the struggles between 
Church and State, of the communal movement, of the 
more frequent commercial communications between 
Europe and the East, and the like. These are them- 
selves the result of the development, the maturing, and 
the modernization of thought, which grows with life 
and makes life grow. Neither life nor thought remained 
attached to the conceptions of the fathers of the Church, 
of Augustine, of Orosius, to whom history offered 
nothing but the proof of the infinite evils that afflict 
humanity, of the unceasing punishments of God, 
and of the "deaths of the persecutors." In Otto of 
Frisia himself, who holds more firmly than the others 
to the doctrines of Augustine, we find the asperity of 
doctrine tempered by grace ; and when he afterward 
proceeds to narrate the struggle between the Church 
and the Empire, if it cannot be said that he takes the 
side of the Empire, it also cannot be said that he 
resolutely defends that of the Church, for the eschato- 
logical visions that form so great a part of his work do 
not blind his practical sense and political judgment. 
The party of the faith against the faithless remained, 
however, always the * great party,* the great * struggle 
of classes ' (elect and reprobate) and of * states * (celestial 
and earthly cities). But within this large framework 
we perceive other figures more closely particularized, 
other parties and interests, which gradually come to 
occupy the first, second, and third planes, so that the 
struggle between God and the devil is forced ever more 
and more into the background and becomes somewhat 
vague, something always assumed to be present, but 
not felt to be active and urgent in the soul, as something 



MEDIEVAL HISTORIOGRAPHY 219 

I which is still talked of, but is not deeply felt, or at least 
felt with the energy that the words would wish us to 
believe, the words themselves often sounding like a 
refrain, as pious as it is conventional. The miraculous 
gradually fills less and less space and appears more 
rarely : God acts more willingly by means of secondary 
causes, and respects natural laws ; He rarely intervenes 
directly in a revolutionary manner. The form of the 
chronicles, too, becomes also less accidental and arid, 
the better among the chroniclers here and there seeking 
a different ' order ' — ^that is to say, really, a better under- 
standing — and we find (particularly from the thirteenth 
century onward) the ordo artificialis or internal opposed 
to the ordo naturalis or external chronological order. 
There are also to be found those who distinguish 
between the suh singulis annis descrihere and the suh 
stilo historico conglutinare — ^that is to say, the grouping 
together according to things described. The general 
aspect of historiography changes not a little. Limiting 
ourselves to Italian historiography alone, there are no 
longer little books upon the miracles and the translations 
of the bodies of saints and bishops, but chronicles of 
communes, all of them full of affection for the feudal 
superiors or for the archbishop, for the imperial or the 
anti-imperial side, for Milan or for Bergamo, or for 
Lodi. The sense of tragedy, which weighed so heavily 
upon Erchempertus, returns with new and stronger 
accents in the narrative of the deeds of Barbarossa at 
Milan, entitled Libellus tristitia et doloris, angustia et 
trihulationis^ passionum et tormentorum. Love for one's 
city usurps much of the space previously devoted to 
things celestial, and praises of Milan, of Bergamo, of 
Venice, of Amalfi, of Naples, resound in the pages 
of their chroniclers. Thus those vast chronicles are 



220 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

reached which, although they begin with the Tower 
of Babel, yet lead to the history of that city or of that 
event which makes the strongest appeal to the feelings 
and best stimulates the industry of the writer, and become 
mingled with the persons and things of the present or 
future life. Giovanni Villani, a pilgrim to Rome to cele- 
brate the papal jubilee, is not inspired with the ascetic 
spirit or raised to heaven by that solemn spectacle ; 
but, on the contrary, " since he finds himself in the holy 
city of Rome on that blessed pilgrimage, inspecting its 
great and ancient -possessions^ and reading the histories 
and the great deeds of the Romans," he is inspired to 
compose the history of his native Fiorenza, " daughter 
and creation of Rome " (of ancient Rome prior to 
Christianity). His Fiorenza resembled Rome in its 
rise to greatness and its following after great things, 
and was like Rome in its fall. Thus the * holy ' and the 
* blessed ' do not lead him to holy and blessed thoughts, 
but to thoughts of worldly greatness. To the historio- 
graphy of the communes answers the more seriously 
worldly, the more formally and historically elaborated 
historiography of the Norman and Suabian kingdom of 
Sicily. In the proem to its Constitutiones sovereigns are 
declared to be instituted ipsa rerum necessitate cogente^ 
nee minus divince provisionis instinctu ; with its Romualdo 
Guarna, its Abbot Telesino, its Malaterra, its Hugo 
Falcando and Pietro da Eboli, its Riccardo da San 
Germano, with the pseudo-Jamsilla, and Saba Mala- 
spina. All of these have their heroes, Roger and William 
the Normans, Frederick and Manfred the Suabians, 
and what they praise in them is the sound political 
basis which they knew how to establish and to main- 
tain with a firm hand. Eo tempore, says Falcando of 
Roger, Regnum Siciliie, strenuis et praclaris viris ahundans. 



MEDIEVAL HISTORIOGRAPHY 221 

cum terra marique plurimum posset, vicinis circumquoque 
gentibus terrorem incusserat, summaque pace ac tranquilli- 
tate maxima fruehatur. And the so-called Jamsilla, 
of Frederick II : Vir fuit magni cordis, sed magnani- 
tatem suam multa, quce in eo fuit, sapientia superavit, 
ut nequaquam impetus eum ad aliquid faciendum impelleret, 
sed ad omnia cum rationis maturitate procederet ; . . . 
utpote qui philosophise studiosus erat quam et ipse in 
se coluit, et in regno suo propagare ordinavit. Tunc 
quidem ipsius felici tempore in regno SicilidC erant litterati 
pauci vel nulli ; ipse vero imperator liheralium artium 
et omnis approbate scienti^e scholas in regno ipso con- 
stituit . . . ut omnis conditionis et fortune homines nullius 
occasione indigenti^e a philosophise studio retraherentur. 
The state, profane culture, ' philosophy,' impersonated 
in the heresiarch Frederick, are thus set in clear relief. 
And while on the one hand more and more laical theories 
of the state become joined to these political and cultural 
currents (from Dante, indeed from Thomas Aquinas, 
to Marsilio of Padua), and the first outlines of literary 
history (lives of the poets and of men famous for their 
knowledge, and the rise of vernacular literatures) and 
histories of manners (as in certain passages in Rico- 
baldo of Ferrara), on the other hand scholasticism 
found its way to such problems and conceptions by 
means of the works of Aristotle, which represented as 
it were a first brief summary of ancient knowledge. 
It is unnecessary to say that Dante's poem is the chief 
monument of this condition of spirit, where the ideas 
of the Middle Ages are maintained, but the political, 
poetical, and philosophical affections, the love of fame 
and of glory, prove their vigour, although subordinated 
to those ideas and restrained, as far as possible, by 
them. 



222 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

But those ideas are nevertheless maintained, even 
among the imperialists and adversaries of the Church, 
and it is only in rare spirits that we find a partly sceptical 
and partly mocking negation of them. Transcendency, 
the prescience of God, Who ordains, directs, and dis- 
poses of everything according to His will, bestows rewards 
and punishments, and intervenes mysteriously, always 
maintains its place in the distant background, in Dante 
as in Giovanni Villani, as in all the historians and 
chroniclers. Toward the close of the fifteenth century 
the theological conception makes a curious appearance 
in the French historian Comines, arm in arm with the 
most alert and unprejudiced policy of success at all 
costs. Worldliness, so rich, so various, and so complex, 
was yet without an ideal standard of comparison, and 
for this reason it was rather lived than thought, showing 
itself rather in richness of detail than systematically. 
The ancient elements of culture, which had passed 
from Aristotelianism into scholasticism, failed to act 
powerfully, because that part of Aristotelianism was 
particularly selected which was in harmony with 
Christian thought already translated into Platonic 
terms and dogmatized in a transcendental form by the 
fathers of the Church. Hence it has even been possible 
to note a pause in historiographical interest, where 
scholasticism has prevailed, a compendium of the type 
of that of Martin Polonus being held sufficient to serve 
the end of quotations for demonstration or for legal 
purposes. What was required upon entering a new 
period of progress (there is always progress, but * periods 
of progress ' are those in which the motion of the spirit 
seems to become accelerated and the fruit that has been 
growing ripe for centuries is rapidly plucked) was a 
direct conscious negation of transcendency and of 



MEDIEVAL HISTORIOGRAPHY 223 

Christian miracle, of ascesis and of eschatology, both 
in life and in thought ; a negation whose terms (heavenly 
and earthly life) had certainly been noted by medieval 
historiography, but had been allowed to endure and to 
progress, the one beside the other, without true and 
proper contact and conflict arising between them. 



IV 

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE 
RENAISSANCE 

THE negation of Christian transcendency was 
the work of the age of the Renaissance, when, 
to employ the expression used by Fueter, 
historiography became * secularized.* In the histories 
of Leonardo Bruni and of Bracciolini, who gave the 
first conspicuous examples of the new attitude of his- 
toriographical thought, and in all others of the same 
sort which followed them — among them those of 
Machiavelli and of Guicciardini shine forth con- 
spicuously — we find hardly any trace of * miracles.' 
These are recorded solely with the intention of mocking 
at them and of explaining them in an altogether human 
manner. An acute analysis of individual characters 
and interests is substituted for the intervention of divine 
providence and the actions of the popes, and religious 
strifes themselves are apt to be interpreted according 
to utilitarian passions and solely with an eye to their 
political bearing. The scheme of the four monarchies 
with the advent of Antichrist connected with it is allowed 
to disappear ; histories are now narrated ah inclinatione 
imperii, and even universal histories, like the Enneads 
of Sabellicus, do not adhere to traditional ecclesiastical 
tradition. Chronicles of the world, universal miraculous 
histories, both theological and apocalyptic, become the 
literature of the people and of those with little culture, 
or persist in countries of backward culture, such as 
Germany at that time, or finally are limited to the circle 
224 



THE RENAISSANCE 225 

of Catholic or Protestant confessional historiography, 
both of which retain so much of the Middle Ages, the 
Protestant perhaps more than the Catholic (at least at 
a first glance), for the latter contrived at least here and 
there to temporize and to accommodate itself to the 
times. All this is shown very clearly and minutely 
by Fueter, and I shall now proceed to take certain 
observations and some information from his book, 
which I shall rearrange and complete with some more 
of my own. In the political historiography of the late 
Middle Ages, the theological conception had been, as 
we have said, thrown into the background ; but hence- 
forward it is not to be found even there, and if at times 
we hear its formulas, they are just like those of the 
Crusade against the Turks, preaching the liberation 
of the tomb of Christ. These were still repeated by 
preachers, writers of verse, and rhetoricians (and con- 
tinued to be repeated for three centuries), but they 
found no response in political reality and in the con- 
science of the people, because they were but empty 
sound. Nor was the negation of theologism and the 
secularization of history accomplished only in prac- 
tice, unaccompanied with complete consciousness ; for, 
although many minds really did turn in the direction 
indicated by fate, or in other words by the new mental 
necessity, and although the polemic was not always 
open, but on the contrary often surrounded with many 
precautions, evidence abounds of the agreement of 
the practice with the theory of historiography. The 
criticism of so grave a theorist of history as Bodin is 
opposed to the scheme of the four monarchies. He 
makes it his object to combat the inveteratum error em 
de quattuor imperils^ proving that the notion was 
capriciously taken from the dream of Daniel, and that 



226 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

it in no way corresponded with the real course of events. 
It would be superfluous to record here the celebrated 
epigrams of Machiavelli and of Guicciardini, who 
satirized theology and miracles. Guicciardini noted 
that all religions have boasted of miracles, and there- 
fore they are not proofs of any one of them, and are 
perhaps nothing but "secrets of nature." He advised 
his readers never to say that God had aided so-and-so 
because he was good and had made so-and-so suffer 
because he was wicked, for we "often see the opposite," 
and the counsels of divine providence are in fact an 
abyss. Paolo Sarpi, although he admits that " it is a 
pious and religious thought to attribute the disposition 
of every event to divine providence," yet holds it "pre- 
sumption " to determine '* to what end events are directed 
by that highest wisdom"; for men, being emotionally 
attached to their opinions, "are persuaded that they are 
as much loved and favoured by God as by themselves." 
Hence, for example, they argued that God had caused 
Zwingli and Hecolampadius to die almost at the same 
time, in order that he might punish and remove the 
ministers of discord, whereas it is certain that "after 
the death of these two, the evangelical cantons have 
made greater progress in the doctrine that they received 
from both of them." Such a disposition of religious 
and cautious spirits is yet more significant than that 
of the radical and impetuous, openly irreverent, in the 
same way as the new importance attributed to history 
is notable in the increase of historiographical labour 
that is then everywhere noticeable, and in the formation 
of a true and proper philological school, not only for 
antiquity, but for the Middle Ages (Valla, Flavio Biondo, 
Calchi, Sigonio, Beato Renano, etc.), which publishes 
and restores texts, criticizes the authenticity and the 



THE RENAISSANCE 227 

value of sources, is occupied with the establishment 
of a technical method of examining witnesses, and 
composes learned histories. 

Nothing is more natural than that the new form of 
historiography should seem to be a return to Grasco- 
Roman antiquity, as Christianity had seemed to be a 
return to the story of Eden (the interlude of paganism 
having been brought to an end by the redemption), 
or that the Middle Ages should still seem to some 
to-day to be a falling back into barbarous pre-Hellenic 
times. The illusion of the return was expressed in 
the cult of classical antiquity, and in all those mani- 
festations, literary, artistic, moral, and customary, 
familiar to those who know the Renaissance. In the 
special field with which we are at present occupied, 
we find a curious document in support of the difficulty 
that philologists and critics experienced in persuading 
themselves that the Greek and Roman writers had 
perhaps been able to deceive themselves, to lie, to falsify, 
to be led astray by passions and blinded by ignorance, 
in the same way as those of the Middle Ages. Thus 
the latter were severely criticized while the former 
were reverenced and accepted, for it needed much time 
and labour to attain to an equal mental freedom regarding 
the ancients, and the criticism of texts and of sources 
was developed in respect to medieval history long 
before it attained to a like freedom in respect to ancient 
history. But the greatest proof and monument of the 
illusion of the return was the formation of the humanistic 
type of historiography, opposed to the medieval. This 
had been chiefly confined to the form of chronicle and 
humanistic historiography, although it accepted the 
arrangement by years and seasons according to the 
examples set by the Greeks and Romans, cancelled as 



22 8 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

far as possible numerical indications, and exerted itself 
to run on unbrokenly, without chronological cuts and 
cross-cuts. Latin had become barbarous in the Middle 
Ages and had accepted the vocabularies of vulgar 
tongues, or those which designated new things in a new 
way, whereas the humanistic historiographers trans- 
lated and disguised every thought and every narrative 
in Ciceronian Latin, or at least Latin of the Golden Age. 
We frequently find picturesque anecdotes in the medieval 
chronicles, and humanism, while it restored its dignity 
to history, deprived it of that picturesque element, or 
attenuated and polished it as it had done the things 
and customs of the barbaric centuries. This humanistic 
type of historiography, like the new philological erudi- 
tion and criticism and the whole movement of the 
Renaissance, was Italian work, and in Italy histories 
in the vulgar tongue were soon modelled upon it, which 
found in the latinized prose of Boccaccio an instrument 
well suited to their ends. From Italy it was diffused 
among other countries, and as always happens when 
an industry is transplanted into virgin soil, and work- 
men and technical experts are invited to come from the 
country of its origin, so the first humanistic historians 
of the other parts of Europe were Italians. Paolo 
Emilio the Veronese, who Gallis condidit historias, gave 
the French the humanistic history of France in his 
De rebus gestis Francorum^ and Polydore Virgil did the 
like for England, Lucio Marineo for Spain, and many 
others for other countries, until indigenous experts 
appeared and the aid of Italians became unnecessary. 
Later on it became necessary to throw off this cloak, 
which was too loose or too tight — indeed, was not cut to 
the model of modern thought. What there was in it 
of artificial, of swollen, of false, was blamed — these 



THE RENAISSANCE 229 

defects being indeed clearly indicated in the construc- 
tive principle of this literary form, which was that of 
imitation. But anyone with a feeling for the past will 
enjoy that historical humanistic prose as the expression 
of love for antiquity and of the desire to rise to its level. 
This love and this desire were so keen that they had no 
hesitation in reproducing things external and indifferent 
in addition to what was better and sometimes in default 
of it. Giambattista Vico, sometimes so sublimely 
puerile, is still found lamenting, three centuries after 
the creation of humanistic historiography, that " no 
sovereign has been found into whose mind has entered 
the thought of preserving for ever in the best Latin 
style a record of the famous War of the Spanish 
Succession, than which a greater has never happened 
in the world since the Second Carthaginian War, that 
of Caesar with Pompey, and of Alexander with Darius." 
But what of this ? Quite recently, during the war in 
Tripoli, came the proposal from the depths of one of 
the meridional provinces of Italy, one of those little 
countrysides where the shadow of a humanist still exists, 
that a Latin commentary should be composed upon that 
war entitled De hello lihico. This proposal was received 
with much laughter and made even me smile, yet the 
smile was accompanied with a sort of tender emotion, 
when I recalled how long and devotedly our fathers 
and forefathers had pursued the ideal of a beautiful 
antiquity and of a decorous historiography. 

Nevertheless, the belief in the effectivity or possi- 
bility of such a return was, as we have said, an illusion ; 
nothing of what has been returns, nothing of what has 
been can be abolished ; even when we return to an 
old thought the new adversary makes the defence 
new and the thought itself new. I read some time 



230 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

ago the work of a learned French Catholic. While 
clearing the Middle Ages of certain absurd accusations 
and confuting errors commonly circulated about them, 
he maintained that the Middle Ages are the truly modern 
time, modern with the eternal modernity of the true, 
and that therefore they should not be called the Middle 
Ages, which term should be applied to the period that 
has elapsed between the jfifteenth century and our own 
day, between the Reformation and positivism. As I read, 
I reflected that such a theory is the worthy pendant 
to that other theory, which places the Middle Ages 
beneath antiquity, and that both had some time ago 
shown themselves false to historical thought, which 
knows nothing of returns, but knows that the Middle 
Ages preserved antiquity deep in its heart as the 
Renaissance preserved the Middle Ages. And what is 

* humanism * but a renewed formula of that * humanity * 
of which the ancient world knew little or nothing, and 
which Christianity and the Middle Ages had so pro- 
foundly felt ? What is the word ' renaissance * or 
' renewal ' but a metaphor taken from the language of 
religion ? And setting aside the word, is not the con- 
ception of humanism perhaps the affirmation of a spiritual 
and universal value, and in so far as it is that, altogether 
foreign, as we know, to the mind of antiquity, and 
an intrinsic continuation of the * ecclesiastical ' and 

* spiritual * history which appeared with Christianity ? 
The conception of spiritual value had without doubt 
become changed or enriched, for it contained within 
itself more than a thousand years of mental experiences, 
thoughts, and actions. But while it thus grew more 
rich, it preserved its original character, and constituted 
the religion of the new times, with its priests and martyrs, 
its polemic and its apologetic, its intolerance (it destroyed 



THE RENAISSANCE 231 

or allowed to perish the monuments of the Middle 
Ages and condemned its writers to oblivion), and some- 
times even imitated the forms of its worship (Navagaro 
used to burn a copy of Martial every year as a holocaust 
to pure Latinity). And since humanity, philosophy, 
science, literature, and especially art, politics, activity 
in all its forms, now fill that conception of value which 
the Middle Ages had placed in Christian religious 
faith alone, histories or outlines of histories continue to 
appear as the outcome of these determinations, which 
were certainly new in respect to medieval literature, 
but were not less new in respect to Graeco-Roman 
literature, where there was nothing to compare to them, 
or only treatises composed in an empirical and extrinsic 
manner. The new histories of values presented them- 
selves timidly, imitating in certain respects the few 
ancient examples, but they gave evidence of a fervour, 
an intelligence, an afflatus, which led to a hope for that 
increase and development wanting to their predecessors, 
which, instead of developing, had gradually become 
more superficial and finally disappeared again into 
vagueness. Sufiice it to mention as representative of 
them all Vasari's Lives of the Painters^ which are con- 
nected with the meditations and the researches upon art 
contained in so many treatises, dialogues, and letters of 
Italians, and are here and there shot through with 
flashes such as never shone in antiquity. The same 
may be said of treatises on poetry and rhetoric, and of 
the judgments which they contain as to poetry and of 
the new history of poetry, then being attempted with 
more or less successful results. The ' state ' too, which 
forms the object of the meditations of Machiavelli, 
is not the simple state of antiquity, city or empire, but 
is almost the national state felt as something divine. 



232 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

to which even the salvation of the soul must be sacrificed 
— that is to say, as the institution in which the true salva- 
tion of the soul is to be found. Even the pagan virtue 
which he and others opposed to Christian virtue is 
very different from the pure Graeco-Roman disposition 
of mind. At that time a start was also made in the 
direction of investigating the theory of rights, of political 
forms, of myths and beliefs, of philosophical systems, 
to-day in full flower. And since that same conscious- 
ness which had produced humanism had also widened 
the boundaries of the known world, and had sought 
for and found people of whom the Bible preserved no 
record and of whom the Graeco-Roman writers knew 
nothing, there appeared at that time a literature relating 
to savages and to the indigenous civilizations of America 
(and also of distant Asia, which had been better explored), 
from which arose the first notions as to the primitive 
forms of human life. Thus were widened the spiritual 
boundaries of humanity at the same time as the material. 
We are not alone in perceiving the illusion of the 
' return to antiquity,' for the men of the Renaissance 
were not slow in doing this. Not every one was content 
to suit himself to the humanistic literary type. Some, 
like Machiavelli, threw away that cloak, too ample in 
its folds and in its train, preferring to it the shorter 
modern dress. Protests against pedantry and imita- 
tion are indeed frequently to be heard during the 
course of the century. Philosophers rebelled against 
Aristotle (first against the medieval and then against 
the ancient Aristotle), and appeals were made to truth, 
which is superior both to Plato and to Aristotle ; men 
of letters advocated the new ' classes,' and artists re- 
peated that the great masters were * nature ' and the 
* idea.' One feels in the air that the time is not far 



THE RENAISSANCE 233 

distant when the question, " Who are the true ancients ? " 
— that is to say, " Who are the intellectually expert and 
mature ? " — will be answered with, " We are " ; the 
symbol of antiquity will be broken and there will be found 
within it the reality which is human thought, ever new 
in its manifestations. Such an answer may possibly be 
slow in becoming clear and certain as an object of common 
conviction, though it will eventually become so, and 
now suffices to explain the true quality of that return to 
antiquity, by preventing the taking of the symbol for 
the thing symbolized. 

This symbolical covering, cause of prejudices and mis- 
understandings, which enfolded the whole of humanism, 
was not the sole vice from which the historiography of 
the Renaissance suffered. We do not, of course, speak 
here of the bias with which all histories were variously 
affected, according as they were written by men of 
letters who were also courtiers and supported the interests 
of their masters, or official historians of aristocratic 
and conservative states like Venice, or men taking one 
or the other side in the conflicts within the same state, 
such as the ottimani (or aristocratic) and the popular 
party of Florence, or upholders of opposed religious 
beliefs, such as the group of reformed divines of Magde- 
burg and Baronio. We do not speak here of the 
historians who became story-writers (they sometimes 
take to history, like Bandello), or of those who collected 
information with a view to exciting curiosity and creating 
scandal. These are things that belong to all periods, 
and are not sufficient to qualify a particular historio- 
graphical age. But if we examine only that which is 
or wished to be historical thought, the historiography 
of the Renaissance suffered from two other defects, 
each of which it had inherited from one of its progenitors. 



2 34 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

antiquity and the Middle Ages. And above all there 
came to it from antiquity the humanistic-abstract or 
pragmatical conception, as it is called, which inclines 
to explain facts by the individual in his singularity and 
in his atomism, or by means of abstract political forms, 
and the like. For Machiavelli, the prince is not only 
the ideal but the criterion that he adopts for the ex- 
planation of events. He does not only appear in his 
treatises and political opuscules, but in the Florentine 
Histories^ where we meet with him at the very beginning 
— after the terrible imaginative description of the con- 
dition of Italy in the fifth century — in the great figure 
of Theodoric, by whose ' virtue ' and ' goodness ' not 
only Rome and Italy, but all the other parts of the 
Western empire, " arose free from the continual 
scourgings which they had supported for so many 
years from so many invasions, and became again happy 
and well-ordered communities," The same figure re- 
appears in many different forms in the course of the 
centuries described in those histories. Finally, at 
the end of the description of the social struggles of 
Florence, we read that " this city had reached such a 
point that it could be easily adapted to any form of govern- 
ment by a wise lazv-giver.''' In like manner, the History 
of Italy by Guicciardini begins with the description of 
the happiness of Italy at the end of the fifteenth century, 
" acquired at various times and preserved for many 
reasons," not the least of which was "the industry and 
genius of Lorenzo de' Medici," who "strove in every 
way so to balance Italian affairs that they should not 
incline more in one direction than another." He had 
allies in Ferdinand of Aragon and Ludovic the Moor, 
" partly for the same and partly for other reasons," and 
the Venetians were held in check by all three of them. 



THE RENAISSANCE 235 

This perfect system of equilibrium was broken by the 
deaths of Lorenzo, of Ferdinand, and of the Pope. 
All historians of this period express themselves in the 
same way, and although a lively consciousness of the 
spiritual values of humanity was in process of formation, 
as has been seen, yet these were spoken of as though 
they depended upon the will and the intelligence of 
individuals who were their masters, not the contrary. 
In the history of painting, for example, the * prince ' 
for Vasari is Giotto, "who, although born among in- 
expert artisans, alone revived painting and reduced it 
to such a form as might be described as good." Bio- 
graphies are also constantly individualistic, for they 
never succeed in perfectly uniting the individual with 
the work which he creates and which in turn creates 
him. 

The idea of chance or fortune persisted alongside 
the pragmatic conception, its ancient companion. 
Machiavelli assigns the course of events half to fortune 
and half to human prudence, and although the accent 
falls here upon prudence, the acknowledgment of the 
one does not abolish the force of the other, so mysteri- 
ous and transcendent. Guicciardini attacks those who, 
while attributing everything to prudence and virtue, 
exclude " the power of fortune," because we see that 
human affairs " receive at all times great impulsions 
from fortuitous events, which it is not within the power 
of man either to foresee or to escape, and although the 
care and understanding of man may moderate many 
things, nevertheless that alone does not suffice, but good 
fortune is also necessary." It is true that here and there 
there seems to appear another conception in Machia- 
velli, that of the strength and logic of things, but it 
is only a fleeting shadow. It is also a shadow for 



236 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

Guicciardini, when he adds that even if we wish to 
attribute everything to prudence and virtue, " we must 
at least admit that it is necessary to fall upon or be 
born in times when the virtues or qualities for which 
you value yourself are esteemed." Guicciardini remains 
perplexed as to one point only, as though he had caught 
a glimpse of something that is neither caprice of the 
individual nor contingency of fortune : " When I con- 
sider to what accidents and dangers of illness, of chance, 
of violence, of infinite sorts, is exposed the life of man, 
the concurrence of how many things is needful that 
the harvest of the year should be good, nothing surprises 
me more than to see an old man or a good harvest." 
But even here we do not get beyond uncertainty, which 
in this case manifests itself as astonishment. With 
the renewal of the idea of fortune, even to a partial 
extent, with the restitution of the cult of this pagan 
divinity, not only does the God of Christianity disappear, 
but also the idea of rationality, of finality, of develop- 
ment, affirmed during the medieval period. The ancient 
Oriental idea of the circle in human affairs returns ; 
it dominated all the historians of the Renaissance, and 
above all Machiavelli. History is an alternation of 
lives and deaths, of goods and ills, of happiness and 
misery, of splendour and decadence. Vasari under- 
stands the history of painting in the same way as 
that of all the arts, which, " like human bodies, have 
their birth, their growth, their old age, and their death." 
He is solicitous of preserving in his book the memory 
of the artistic capacity of his time, lest the art of painting, 
" either owing to the neglect of men or to the malignity 
of the ages or to decree of heaven (which does not appear 
to wish to maintain things here below for long in the 
same state), should encounter the same disorder and 



THE RENAISSANCE 237 

ruin " as befell it in the Middle Ages. Bodin, while 
criticizing and rejecting the scheme of the four 
monarchies, and demonstrating the fallaciousness of 
the assertion that gold deteriorates into copper, or even 
into clay, and celebrating the splendour of letters, of 
commerce, of the geographical discoveries of his age, 
does not, however, conclude in favour of progress, but 
of the circle, blaming those who find everything inferior 
in antiquity, cum^ aterna quadam lege naturae, conversio 
omnium rerum velut in orhem redire videatur^ ut aqua 
vitia viriutibus^ ignoratio scientia, turpe honesto consequens 
sit, ac tenebra luci. The sad, bitter, pessimistic tone 
which we observe among ancient historians, which 
sometimes bursts forth into the tragic, is also often to 
be met with among the historians of the Renaissance, 
for they saw perish many things that were very dear 
to them, and were constrained to tremble for those which 
they still enjoyed, or at least to fear for them by antici- 
pation, certain that sooner or later they would yield 
their place to their contraries. 

And since history thus conceived does not represent 
progress but a circle, and is not directed by the historical 
law of development, but by the natural law of the 
circle, which gives it regularity and uniformity, it 
follows that the historiography of the Renaissance, 
like the Graeco-Roman, has its end outside itself, and 
affords nothing but material suitable for exhortations 
toward the useful and the good, for various forms of 
pleasure or as ornament for abstract truths. Historians 
and theorists of history are all in agreement as to this, 
with the exception of such eccentrics as Patrizzi, who 
expressed doubts as to the utility of knowing what 
had happened and as to the truth itself of narratives, 
but ended by contradicting himself and also laying 



238 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

down an extrinsic end. " Each one of us can find, 
both on his own account and on that of the public 
weal, many useful documents in the knowledge of these 
so different and so important examples," writes Guicci- 
ardini in the proem to his History of Italy. "Hence 
will clearly appear, as the result of innumerable 
examples, the instability of things human, how harmful 
they are often wont to be to themselves, but ever to the 
people, the ill-conceived counsels of those who rule, 
when, having only before their eyes either vain errors 
or present cupidities, they are not mindful of the 
frequent variations of fortune, and converting the 
power that has been granted them for the common 
weal into an injury to others, they become the authors 
of new perturbations, either as the result of lack of 
prudence or of too much ambition." And Bodin 
holds that non solum pr^sentia commode explicantur^ 
sed etiam futura colliguntur^ certissimaque rerum expeten- 
darum ac jugiendarum pracepta constantur, from 
historical narratives. Campanella thinks that history 
should be composed ut sit scientiarum fundamentum 
sufficiens ; Vossius formulates the definition that was 
destined to appear for centuries in treatises : cognitio 
singulariumy quorum memoriam conservari utile sit ad 
bene beateque vivendum. Historical knowledge there- 
fore seemed at that time to be the lowest and easiest 
form of knowledge (and this view has been held down 
to our own days) ; to such an extent that Bodin, in 
addition to the utilitas and the oblectatio, also recog- 
nized to history facilitas, so great a facility ut^ sine ullius 
artis adjumento^ ipsa per sese ah omnibus intelligatur. 
"When truth had been placed outside historical narrative, 
all the historians of the Renaissance, like their Greek 
and Roman predecessors, practised, and all the theorists 



THE RENAISSANCE 239 

(from Pontanus in the Actius to Vossius in the Ars 
historicd) defended, the use of more or less imaginary 
orations and exhortations, not only as the result of 
bowing to ancient example, but through their own 
convictions. Eventually M. de la Popeliniere, in his 
Histoire des histoires^ avec Videe de rhistotre accom- 
plie (1599)5 where he inculcates in turn historical 
exactitude and sincerity with such warm eloquence, 
suddenly turns round to defend imaginary harangues 
et concions^ for this fine reason, that what is necessary 
is * truth ' and not ' the words ' in which it is expressed ! 
The truth of history was thus not history, but oratory 
and political science ; and if the historians of the 
Renaissance were hardly ever able to exercise oratory 
(for which the political constitution of the time allowed 
little scope), all or nearly all were authors of treatises 
upon political science, differently inspired as compared 
with those of the Middle Ages, which had ethical 
and religious thought behind them, resuming and 
advancing the speculations of Aristotle and of ancient 
political writers. In like manner, treatises on historical 
art, unknown to the Middle Ages, but which rapidly 
multiplied in the Renaissance (see a great number 
of them in the Penus artis historic^e of 1579), resumed 
and fertilized the researches of Grasco-Roman theorists. 
It is to be expected that the historiography of this 
period should represent some of the defects of medieval 
historiography in another form, owing to its character 
of reaction already mentioned and to the new divinity 
that it had raised up upon the altars in place of the 
ancient divinity, humanity. The Renaissance every- 
where reveals its effort to oppose the one term to the 
other, and since scholasticism had sought the things of 
God and of the soul, it wished to restrict itself to the 



240 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

things of nature. We find Guicciardini and a chorus 
of others describing the investigations of philosophers 
and theologians and *' of all those who write things 
above nature or such as are not seen " as ' madnesses ' ; 
and because scholasticism had defined science in the 
Aristotelian manner as de universalibus, Campanella 
opposed to this definition his Scientia est de singularibus. 
In like manner its men of letters, prejudiced in favour 
of Latin, at first refused to recognize the new languages 
that had been formed during the Middle Ages, as well 
as medieval literature and poetry ; its jurists rejected the 
feudal in favour of the Roman legal code, its politicians 
representative forms in favour of absolute lordship and 
monarchy. It was then that first appeared the con- 
ception of the Middle Ages as a whole, opposed to 
another whole, formed of the ancient and the ancient- 
modern, into which the Middle Ages were inserted 
like an irksome and painful wedge. The word 

* medieval ' was certainly late in appearing as an 
official designation, employed in the divisions and 
titles of histories (toward the end of the seventeenth 
century, as it would seem, in the manuals of Cellario); 
previously it had only just occurred here and there; 
but the thought contained in it had been in the air for 
some time — that is to say, in the soul of everybody — 
eked out with other words, such as ' barbarous ' or 

* Gothic ' ages, and Vasari expresses it by means of the 
distinction between ancient and ' old,' calling those things 
ancient which occurred before the existence of Con- 
stantine, of Corinth, of Athens, of Rome, and of other 
very famous cities built up to the time of Nero, of 
the Vespasians, of Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus, 
and * old ' those " which had their origin from St 
Silvester onward." In any case, the distinction was 



THE RENAISSANCE 241 

clear : on the one hand most brilliant light, on the 
other dense darkness. After Constantine, writes the 
same Vasari, " every sort of virtue " was lost, " beauti- 
ful " souls and " lofty " intellects became corrupted 
into " most ugly " and " basest," and the fervent zeal 
of the new religion did infinite damage to the arts. 
This means neither more nor less than that dualism^ 
one of the capital traits of the Middle Ages, was retained, 
although differently determined, for now the god was 
(although not openly acknowledged) antiquity, art, 
science, Greek and Roman life, and its adversary, 
the reprobate and rebel, was the Middle Age, * Gothic * 
temples, theology and philosophy bristling with diffi- 
culties, the clumsy and cruel customs of that age. But 
just because the respective functions of the two terms 
V ere merely inverted, their opposition remained, and 
if Christianity did not succeed in understanding 
Paganism and in recognizing its father, so the 
Renaissance failed to recognize itself as the son of the 
Middle Ages, and did not understand the positive 
and durable value of the period that was closing. For 
this reason, both ages destroyed or allowed to disappear 
the monuments of the previous age. This was certainly 
far less the case with the Renaissance, which expressed 
itself less violently and was deeply imbued with 
the thought of the Middle Ages, and, owing to 
the idea of humanity, had an obscure feeling of the 
importance of its predecessor. So much was this the 
case that the school of learned men and philologists 
already mentioned was formed at that time, with the 
view of investigating medieval antiquities. But the 
learned are the learned — that is to say, they do not take 
an active part in the struggles of their time, though 
busied with the collection and arrangement of its 

Q 



242 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

chronicles and remains, which they often judge in 
accordance with the vulgar opinion of their own time, 
so that it is quite customary to find them despising 
the subject of their labours, declaring that the poet 
whom they are studying has no value, or that the 
period to which they are consecrating their entire life 
is ugly and displeasing. It needed much to free the 
flame of intelligence from the heaps of medieval anti- 
quities accumulated for centuries by the learned, and 
the Middle Ages were abhorred during the Renaissance, 
even when they were investigated. The drama of 
love and hatred was not dissimilar in its forms, nor 
less bitterly dualistic, although vastly more interesting, 
than that which was then being played out between 
Catholics and Protestants. The latter called the Pope 
Antichrist, and the primacy of the Roman Church 
mysterium iniquitatis, and compiled a catalogue testium 
veritatis of those who had opposed that iniquity even 
while it prevailed. The Catholics returned the com- 
pliment with remarks about Luther and the Reforma- 
tion, and composed catalogues of heretics, Satan's 
witnesses. But this strife was a relic of the past, and 
would have ended by becoming gradually attenuated 
and dispersed ; whereas the other was an element of 
the future, and could only be conquered by long effort 
and a new conception of the loftiest character. 



V 

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE 
ENLIGHTENMENT 

MEANWHILE the historiography which im- 
mediately followed pushed the double aporia 
of antiquity and of the Middle Ages to the 
extreme ; and it was owing to this radical unprejudiced 
procedure that it acquired its definite physiognomy 
and the right of being considered a particular historio- 
graphical period. The symbolical vesture, woven of 
memories of the Graeco-Roman world, with which the 
modern spirit had first clothed itself, is now torn and 
thrown away. The thought that the ancients had not 
been the oldest and wisest among the peoples, but the 
youngest and the least expert, and that the true ancients, 
that is to say, the most expert and mature in mind, are 
to be found in the men of the modern world, had little 
by little made its way and become universally accepted. 
Reason in its nudity, henceforth saluted by its proper 
name, succeeds the example and the authority of the 
Graeco-Romans, which represented reason opposed 
to barbaric culture and customs. Humanitarianism, 
the cult of humanity, also idolized by the name of 
* nature,' that is to say, ingenuous general human nature, 
succeeds to humanism, with its one-sided admirations 
for certain peoples and for certain forms of life. 
Histories written in Latin become scarce or are confined 
to the learned, and those written in national languages 
are multiplied ; criticism is exercised not only upon 
medieval falsifications and fables, upon the writings 

243 



244 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

of credulous and ignorant monks in monasteries, but 
upon the pages of ancient historians, and the first doubts • 
appear as to the truth of the historical Roman tradition. 
A feeling of sympathy, however, toward the ancients 
still persists, whereas repugnance and abhorrence for 
the Middle Ages continue to increase. All feel and 
say that they have emerged, not only from dark- 
ness, but from the twilight before dawn, that the sun 
of reason is high on the horizon, illuminating the 
intellect and irradiating it with most vivid light. 
' Light,' ' illumination,' and the like are words pro- 
nounced on every occasion and with ever increasing 
conviction and energy ; hence the title * age of light,' 
of ' enlightenment ' or of ' illumination,' given to the 
period extending from Descartes to Kant. Another 
term began to circulate, at first used rarely and in 
a restricted sense — ' progress.' It gradually becomes 
more insistent and familiar, and finally succeeds in 
supplying a criterion for the judgment of facts, for the 
conduct of life, for the construction of history, becomes 
the subject of special investigations, and of a new kind 
of history, the history of the progresses of the human 
spirit. 

But here we observe the persistence and the potency 
of Christian and theological thought. The progress 
so much discussed was, so to speak, a progress without 
development, manifesting itself chiefly in a sigh of satis- 
faction and security, as of one, favoured by fortune, 
who has successfully encountered many obstacles and 
now looks serenely upon the present, secure as to the 
future, with mind averted from the past, or returning 
to it now and then for a brief moment only, in order 
to lament its ugliness, to despise and to smile at it. 
Take as an example of all the most intelligent and 



THE ENLIGHTENMENT 245 

at the same time the best of the historical represen- 
tatives of enlightenment M. de Voltaire, who wrote 
his Essai sur les mceurs in order to aid his friend the 
Marquise du Chatelet to surmonter le degout caused 
her by Vhistoire moderne de-puts la decadence de PEmpire 
romain^ treating the subject in a satirical vein. Or 
take Condorcet's work, VEsquisse d'un tableau historique 
des progres de V esprit humain, which appears at its end 
like a last will and testament (and also as the testament 
of the man who wrote it), and where we find the whole 
century in compendium. It is as happy in the present, 
even in the midst of the slaughters of the Revolution, 
as rosy in its views as to the future, as it is full of con- 
tempt and sarcasm for the past, which had generated 
that present. The felicity of the period upon which 
they were entering was clearly stated. Voltaire says 
that at this time les hommes ont acquis plus de lumieres 
d'un bout de r Europe a V autre que dans tons les ages pre- 
cedents. Man now brandishes the arm which none 
can resist : la seule arme contre le monstre^ c est la Raison : 
la seule maniere d'empecher les hommes d'etre absurdes et 
mechants^ c est de les eclairer ; pour rendre le fanatisme 
execrable, il ne faut que le peindre. Certainly it was not 
denied that there had been something of good and 
beautiful in the past. They must have existed, if they 
suffered from superstition and oppression. On voit dans 
Vhistoire les erreurs et les prejuges se succeder tour a tour, 
et chasser la verite et la raison : on voit les habiles et les 
heureux enchatner les imbeciles et ecraser les infortunes ; 
et encore ces habiles et ces heureux sont eux-memes les jouets 
de la fortune, ainsi que les esclaves qu'ils gouvernent. And 
not only had the good existed, though oppressed, but 
it had also been efficient in a certain measure : au milieu 
de ces saccagements et de ces destructions nous voyons un 



246 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

amour de Vordre qui anime en secret le genre humain et 
qui a prevenu sa ruine totale : c'est un des ressorts de la 
nature^ qui reprend toujours sa force, . . . And then 
the * great epochs ' must not be forgotten, the * centuries * 
in which the arts flourished as the result of the work 
of wise men and monarchs, /es quatre ages heureua of 
history. But between this sporadic good, weak or 
acting covertly, or appearing only for a time and then 
disappearing, and that of the new era, the quantitative 
and energetic difference is such that it is turned into 
a qualitative difference : a moment comes when men 
learn to think, to rectify their ideas, and past history 
seems like a tempestuous sea to one who has landed 
upon solid earth. Certainly everything is not to be 
praised in the new times ; indeed, there is much to 
blame : les ahus servent de his dans presque toute la terre ; 
et si les plus sages des hommes s^ assemblaient pour faire 
des lois^ oil est VEtat dont la forme suhsistdt entiere ? The 
distance from the ideal of reason was still great and the 
new century had still to consider itself as a simple step 
toward complete rationality and felicity. We find the 
fancy of a social form limit even in Kant, who dragged 
after him so much old intellectualistic and scholastic 
philosophy. Sometimes indeed its final form was not 
discovered, and its place was taken by a vertiginous 
succession of more and more radiant social forms. But 
the series of these radiant forms, the progress toward 
the final form and the destruction of abuses, really 
began in the age of enlightenment, after some episodic 
attempts in that direction during previous ages, for 
this age alone had entered upon the just, the wide, the 
sure path, the path illumined with the light of reason. 
It sometimes even happened in the course of that period 
that a doctrine leading to Rousseau's inverted the 



THE ENLIGHTENMENT 247 

usual view and placed reason^ not in modern times or 
in the near or distant future, but in the past, and not 
in the medieval, Graeco-Roman, or Oriental past, but 
in the prehistoric past, in the ' state of nature,' from which 
history represented the deviation. But this theory, 
though differing in its mode of expression, was altogether 
identical in substance with that generally accepted, 
because a prehistoric * state of nature * never had any 
existence in the reality which is history, but expressed 
an ideal to be attained in a near or distant future, which 
had first been perceived in modern times and was there- 
fore really capable of moving in that direction, whether 
in the sense of realization or return. The religious 
character of all this new conception of the world can- 
not be obscure to anyone, for it repeats the Christian 
conceptions of God as truth and justice (the lay God), 
of the earthly paradise, the redemption, the millennium, 
and so on, in laical terms, and in like manner with 
Christianity sets the whole of previous history in opposi- 
tion to itself, to condemn it, while hardly admiring here 
and there some consoling ray of itself. What does it 
matter that religion, and especially Christianity, was 
then the target for fiercest blows and shame and mockery, 
that all reticence was abandoned, and people were no 
longer satisfied with the discreet smile that had once 
blossomed on the lips of the Italian humanists, but 
broke out into open and fanatical warfare ? Even lay 
fanaticism is the result of dogmatism. What does it 
matter that pious folk were shocked and saw the ancient 
Satan in the lay God, as the enlightened discovered the 
capricious, domineering, cruel tribal deity in the old 
God represented by the priest } The possibility of ' 
reciprocal accusations confirms the dualism, active in j 
the new as in the old conception, and rendering it ) 



248 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

unsuitable for the understanding of development and 
of history. 

The historiographical aporia of antiquity was also 
being increased by abstract individualism or the 
' pragmatic ' conception. So true was this that it was 
precisely at that time that the formula was resumed, 
and pragmatism, as history of human ideas, sentiments, 
calculations, and actions, as a narrative embellished 
with reflections, was opposed to theological or medieval 
history and to the old ingenuous chronicles or erudite 
collections of information and documents. Voltaire, 
who combats and mocks at belief in divine designs and 
punishments and in the leadership of a small barbarous 
population called upon to act as an elect people and to 
be the axle of universal history (so that he may substi- 
tute for it the lay theology which has been described), 
is the same Voltaire who praises in Guicciardini and in 
Machiavelli the first appearance of an histoire hien faite. 
The pragmatic mode of treatment was extended even to 
the narrative of events relating to religion and the Church 
and was applied by Mosheim and others in Germany. 
Owing to this penetration of rationalism into ecclesi- 
astical historiography and into Protestant philosophy, 
it afterward seemed that the Reformation had caused 
thought to progress, whereas, as regards this matter, 
the Reformation simply received humanistic thought in 
the new form, to which it had previously been opposed. 
If, in other respects, it aided the advance of the historical 
conception in an original manner, this was brought 
about, as we shall see, by means of another element 
seething within it, mysticism. But meanwhile not 
even Catholicism remained immune from the pragmatic, 
of which we find traces in the Discours of Bossuet, who 
represents the Augustinian conception, shorn of its 



THE ENLIGHTENMENT 249 

accessories, reduced and modernized, lacking the irre- 
concilable dualism of the two cities and the Roman 
Empire as the ultimate and everlasting empire, allowing 
natural causes preordained by God and regulated by the 
laws to operate side by side with divine intervention, 
and conceding a large share to the social and political 
conditions of the various peoples. We do not speak 
of the last step taken by the same author in his Histoire 
des variations des eglises^ when he conceived the history 
of the Reformation objectively and in its internal motives, 
presenting it as a rebellious movement directed against 
authority. Even his adversary Voltaire recognized 
that Bossuet had not omitted d'autres causes in addition 
to the divine will favouring the elect people, because 
he had several times taken count de V esprit des nations. 
Such was the strength of r esprit du siecle. The prag- 
matic conceptions of that time are still so well known 
and so near to us, so persistent in so many of our 
narratives and historical manuals, that it would be useless 
to describe them. When we direct our thoughts to 
the historical works of the eighteenth century, there 
immediately rises to the memory the general outline 
of a history in which priests deceive, courtiers intrigue, 
wise monarchs conceive and realize good institutions, 
combated and rendered almost vain through the malignity 
of others and the ignorance of the people, though they 
remain nevertheless a perpetual object of admiration 
for enlightened spirits. The image of chance or caprice 
appears with the evocation of that image, and mingling 
with the histories of these conflicts makes them yet more 
complicated, their results yet stranger and more astonish- 
ing. And what was the use, that is to say, the end, 
of historical narrative in the view of those historians } 
Here also the reading of a few lines of Voltaire affords 



250 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

the explanation : Cet advantage consiste surtout dans la 
comparaison qu'un homme d^ Stat, un citoyen, pent faire 
des lots et des mceurs etrangeres avec celles de son pays : 
c est ce qui excite V emulation des nations modernes dans 
les arts, dans V agriculture, dans le commerce. Les grandes 
fautes passees servent heaucoup a tout genre. On ne 
saurait trop remettre devant les yeux les crimes et les mal- 
heurs : on peut, quoi qu^on en dise, prevenir les uns et les 
autres. This thought is repeated with many verbal 
variations and is to be found in nearly all the books 
of historiographic theory of the time, continuing the 
Italian mode of the Renaissance in an easier and more 
popular style. The words * philosophy of history,* 
which had later so much success, at first served to describe 
the assistance obtainable from history in the shape of 
advice and useful precepts, when investigated without 
prejudice — that is to say, with the one * assumption ' 
of reason. 

The external end assigned to history led to the 
same results as in antiquity, when history became 
oratorical and even historico-pedagogic romances were 
composed, and as in the Renaissance, when * declamatory 
orations ' were preserved, and history was treated as 
material more or less well adapted to certain ends, 
whence arose a certain amount of indifference toward 
its truth, so that Machiavelli, for instance, deduced 
laws and precepts from the decades of Livy, not only 
assuming them to be true, but accepting them in those 
parts which he must have recognized to be demon- 
strably fabulous. Orations began to disappear, but their 
disappearance was due to good literary taste rather than 
to anything else, which recognized how out of harmony 
were those expedients with the new popular, prosaic, 
polemical tone that narrative assumed in the eighteenth 



THE ENLIGHTENMENT 251 

century. In exchange they got something worse : 
lack of esteem for history, which was considered to be 
an inferior reality, unworthy of the philosopher, who 
seeks for laws, for what is constant, for the uniform, 
the general, and can find it in himself and in the direct 
observation of external and internal nature, natural 
and human, without making that long, useless, and 
dangerous tour of facts narrated in the histories. 
Descartes, Malebranche, and the long list of their suc- 
cessors do not need especial mention here, for it is well 
known how mathematics and naturalism dominated and 
depressed history at this period. But was historical 
truth at least an inferior truth ? After fuller reflection, 
it did not seem possible to grant even this. In history, 
said Voltaire, the word ' certain,' which is used to 
designate such knowledge as that " two and two make 
four," « I think," " I suffer," "I exist," should be used 
very rarely, and in the sole sense of "very probable." 
Others held that even this was saying too much, for 
they altogether denied the truth of history^ and declared 
that it was a collection of fables, of inventions and equi- 
vocations, or of undemonstrable affirmations. Hence 
the scepticism or Pyrrhonism of the eighteenth century, 
which showed itself on several occasions and has left 
us a series of curious little books as a document of itself. 
Such is, indeed, the inevitable result when historical 
knowledge is looked upon as a mass of individual testi- 
monies, dictated or altered by the passions, or misun- 
derstood through ignorance, good at the best for supply- 
ing edifying and terrible examples in confirmation of the 
eternal truths of reason, which, for the rest, shine with 
their own light. 

It would nevertheless be altogether erroneous to 
found upon the exaggeration to which the theological 



252 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

and pragmatical views attained in the historiography 
of the enlightenment, and see in it a decadence or 
regression similar to that of the Renaissance and of 
other predecessors. Not only were germs of error 
evolved at that time, not only did the difficulties 
that had appeared in the previous period become more 
acute, but there was also developed, and elevated to 
a high degree of efficiency, that historiography of 
spiritual values which Christian historiography had 
intensified and almost created, and which the Renais- 
sance had begun to transfer to the earth. Voltaire 
as historiographer deserves to be defended (and this 
has recently been done by several writers, admirably 
by Fueter), because he has a lively perception of the 
need of bringing history back from the treatment of 
the external to that of the internal and strives to satisfy 
this need. For this reason, books that gave accounts 
of wars, treaties, ceremonies, and solemnities seemed 
to him to be nothing but * archives ' or ' historical 
dictionaries,' useful for consultation on certain occa- 
sions, but history, true history, he held to be some- 
thing altogether different. The duty of true history 
could not be to weight the memory with external or 
material facts, or as he called them events (Svenements)^ 
but to discover what was the society of men in the 
past, la societe des hommes, comment on vivait dans 
Vinterieur des families^ quels arts etaient cultives^ and to 
paint ' manners ' (Jes mceurs^ ; not to lose itself in 
the multitude of insignificant particulars {petits faits\ 
but to collect only those that were of importance (con- 
siderables) and to explain the spirit (Tesprii) that had 
produced them. Owing to this preference that Voltaire 
accords to manners over battles we find in him the con- 
ception (although it remains without adequate treatment 



THE ENLIGHTENMENT 253 

and gets lost in the ardour of polemic) that it is not 
for history to trace the portrait of human splendours and 
miseries {les details de la splendeur et de la mishe humaine) 
but only of manners and of the arts, that is, of the 
positive work ; in his Steele de Louis XIV he says that 
he wishes to illustrate the government of that monarch, 
not in so far as // a fait du hien aux fran^ais^ but in so 
far as il a fait du hien aux hommes. What Voltaire 
undertook, and to no small extent achieved, forms the 
principal object of all historians' labours at this period. 
Whoever wishes to do so can see in Fueter's book how 
the great pictures to be found in Voltaire's Essai sur 
les mceurs and Steele were imitated in the pages both 
of French writers and in those of other European 
countries — for instance, in the celebrated introduction by 
Robertson to his history of Charles V. It will also be 
noticed how the special histories of this or that aspect 
of culture are multiplied and perfected, as though 
several of the desiderata mentioned by Bacon in his 
classification of history had been thus supplied. The 
history of philosophy abandons more and more the type 
of collections of anecdotes and utterances of philosophers, 
to become the history of systems, from. Brucker to Buhle 
and to Tiedemann. The history of art takes the shape 
of a special problem in Winckelmann's work and in 
the works of his successors. In Voltaire's own books 
and in those of his school it assumes that of literature ; 
in those of Dubos and of Montesquieu that of rights 
and of institutions ; in Germany it leads to the pro- 
duction of a work as original and realistic as the history of 
Osnabriick by Moser. In the specialist work of Heeren, 
the history of industry and commerce separates itself 
from the historical divisions or digressions of economic 
treatises and takes a form of its own. The history of 



2 54 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

social customs investigates (as in Sainte-Palaye's book 
on Ancienne chevalerie) even the minutest aspects of 
social and moral life. Had not Voltaire remarked 
about tournaments that // se fait des revolutions dans 
les plaisirs comme dans tout le reste ? And to limit our- 
selves to Italy, which at that time was also acting on the 
initiative, though she soon afterward withdrew and 
received her impulse from the other countries of Europe, 
it is well to remember that in the eighteenth century 
Pietro Giannone, expressing the desires and the attempts 
at their realization of a multitude of Neapolitan com- 
patriots and contemporaries, traced the civil history 
of the Kingdom of Naples, giving much space to the 
relations between Church and State and to the incidents 
of legislation. Many followed this example in Italy 
and outside it (among the many were Montesquieu and 
Gibbon). In Italy, too, Ludovico Antonio Muratori 
illustrated medieval life in his Antiquitates Itali^e^ and 
Tiraboschi composed a great history of Italian literature 
(understood as that of the whole culture of Italy), notable 
not less for its erudition than for its clearness of design, 
while other lesser writers, like Napoli Signorelli, in his 
Vicende della cultura delle due Sicilie, particularized in cer- 
tain regions, sprinkling their history with the philosophy 
current at the time. The Jesuit Bettinelli, too, imitated 
the historical books of Voltaire for the history of letters, 
arts, and customs in Italy, Bonafede the work of Brucker 
for the history of philosophy, and Lanzi, in a manner far 
superior to those just mentioned, continued the path 
followed by Winckelmann in his History of Painting. 

Not only did the historiography of the enlightenment 
render history more * interior ' and develop it in its 
interiority, but it also broadened it in space and time. 
Here too Voltaire represents in an eminent degree the 



THE ENLIGHTENMENT 255 

needs of his age, with his continual accusations of narrow- 
ness and meanness levelled at the traditional image of 
universal history, as composed of Hebrew or sacred 
history and Greeco-Roman or profane history, or, as 
he says, histoires -pretendues universelles^ fabriquees dans 
notre Occident. A beginning was made with the use 
of the material discovered, transported, and accumulated 
by explorers and travellers from the Renaissance onward, 
of which a considerable part had been contributed by 
the Jesuits and by missionaries. India and China 
attracted attention, both on account of their antiquity 
and of the high grade of civilization to which they had 
attained. Translations of religious and literary Oriental 
texts were soon added to this, and it became possible 
to discuss that civilization, not merely at second-hand 
and according to the narratives of travellers. This 
increase of knowledge relating to the East is paralleled 
by increase of knowledge not only in relation to anti- 
quity (these studies were never dropped, but changed 
their centre, first from Italy to France and Holland, 
then to England, and then to Germany), but also in regard 
to the Middle Ages, in the works of the Benedictines, 
of Leibnitz, Muratori, and very many others, who here 
also specialized both as regards the objects of their 
researches and as to the regions or cities in which they 
conducted them, as for instance De Meo in his Annali 
critici del Regno di ISIapoli. 

With the increase of erudition, of the variety of 
documents and information available, went hand in 
hand a more refined criticism as to the authenticity of 
the one and of the value as evidence of the other. Fueter 
does well to note the progress in method accomplished by 
the Benedictines and by Leibnitz (who did not surpass 
those excellent and learned monks in this respect, 



256 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

although he was a philosopher) up to Muratori, who 
did not restrict himself to testing the genuineness of 
tradition, but initiated criticism of the tendencies of 
individual witnesses, of the interests and passions which 
colour and give their shape to narratives. The en- 
lightened, with Voltaire at their head, initiated another 
kind of criticism of a more intrinsic sort, directed to 
things and to the knowledge of things (to literary, 
moral, political, and military experience), recognizing 
the impossibility that things should have happened in 
the way that they are said to have happened by super- 
ficial, credulous, or prejudiced historians, and attempting 
to reconstruct them in the only way that they could 
have happened. We shall admire in Voltaire (especially 
in the Siecle) his lack of confidence in the reports of 
courtiers and servants, accustomed to forge calumnies and 
to interpret maliciously and anecdotically the external 
actions of sovereigns and statesmen. 

This happened because the historiography of the 
enlightenment, while it preserved and even exaggerated 
pragmatism, yet on the other hand refined and spiritual- 
ized it, as will have been observed in the expressions 
preferred by Voltaire and even in the theologizing 
Bossuet : Ves-prit des nations^ V esprit du temps. What 
that esprit was naturally remained vague, because the 
support of philosophy, in which at that time those 
newly imported concepts introduced an unexpected 
element of conflict, was lacking to refer it to the 
ideal determinations of the spirit in its develop- 
ment and to conceive the various epochs and the 
various nations as each playing its own part in the 
spiritual drama. Thus it often happened that esprit 
was perverted into a fixed quality, such as race., if it 
were a question of nations, and into a current or mode. 



THE ENLIGHTENMENT 257 

if periods were spoken of, and was thus naturalized and 
pragmatized. Trois choses^ wrote Voltaire, influent sans 
cesse sur I'esprit des hommes^ le climat^ le gouvernement, 
et la religion : c'est la seule maniere d^expliquer V enigme 
du monde : where the ' spirit ' is lowered to the position 
of a product of natural and social circumstances. The 
suggestive word had, however, been pronounced, and a 
clear consciousness of the terms themselves of the social, 
political, and cultural struggle that was being carried 
on would have little by little emerged. For the time 
being, climate, government, religion, genius of the 
peoples, genius of the time, were all more or less happy 
attempts to go beyond pragmatism and to place causality 
in a universal order. This effort, and at the same time 
its limit — ^that is to say, the falling back into the abstract 
and pragmatic form of explanation — is also shown in 
the doctrine of the ' single event,' which was believed 
to determine at a stroke the new epoch of barbarism 
or of civilization. Thus at this time it was customary 
to assign enormous importance to the Crusades or to 
the Turkish occupation of Constantinople, as Fueter 
records, with special reference to Richardson's history. 
Another consequence of the same embarrassment was 
the slight degree of fusion attained in the various histories 
of culture, of customs, and of the arts that were composed 
at this time. The various manifestations of life were 
set down one after the other without any success, or 
even any attempt at developing them organically. 

Doubtless the new and vigorous historiographical 
tendencies of the enlightenment were then attacking 
other barriers opposed to them by the already mentioned 
lay-theological dualism, in addition to those of prag- 
matism and of naturalism. This lay-theology ended 
by negating the principle of development itself, because 



258 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

the judgment of the past as consisting of darkness and 
errors precluded any serious conception of religion, 
poetry, philosophy, or of primitive and bygone institu- 
tions. What did an institution of the great importance 
of * divination ' in primitive civilizations amount to 
for Voltaire in the formative process of observation and 
scientific deduction ? The invention du premier fripon 
qui rencontra un imbecile. Or oracles, also of such 
importance in the life of antiquity ? Des Jourberies. 
To what amounted the theological struggles between 
Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists in connexion with 
the Eucharist ? To the ridiculous spectacle of the 
Papists who mangeaient Dieu pour pain, les lutheriens du 
pain et Dieu, les cahinistes mangerent le pain et ne man- 
ger ent point Dieu, What was the only end that could 
be attained by the Jansenists ? Boredom : a sequence 
of tiresome querelles theologiques and of petty querelles 
de plume, so that nothing remains of the writers of that 
time who took part in them but geometry, reasoned 
grammar, logic — that is to say, only what appartient a 
la raison ; the querelles theologiques were une maladie 
de plus dans V esprit humain. Nor does the philosophy 
of earlier times receive better treatment. That of 
Plato was nothing but une mauvaise metaphysique, a 
tissue of arguments so bad that it seems impossible they 
could have been admired and added to by others yet 
more extravagant from century to century, until Locke 
was reached : Locke, qui seul a developpe V entendement 
humain dans un livre ou il n^y a que des verites, et, ce qui 
rend Vouvrage parjait, toutes les verites sont claires. In 
poetry, modern work was placed above ancient, the 
Gerusalemme above the Iliad, the Orlando above the 
Odyssey, Dante seems obscure and awkward, Shakespeare 
a barbarian not without talent. Medieval literature 



THE ENLIGHTENMENT 259 

was beneath consideration : On a recueilli quelques mal- 
heureuses compositions de ce temps : cest faire un amas 
de cailloux tires d* antiques masures quand on est entoure 
de palais. Frederick of Prussia, who here showed 
himself a consistent Voltairean, did not receive the new 
edition of the Nibelungenlied and the other epic monu- 
ments of Germany graciously. In a word, the whole 
of the past lost its value, or preserved only the negative 
value of evil : Que les citoyens d'une ville immense^ oil 
les artSy les plaisirs^ et la paix regnent aujourd'hui^ ou la 
raison meme commence a s^introduire^ comparent les temps^ 
et quails se plaignent, s^ils osent. Cest une reflexion qu^il 
jaut faire presque a chaque page de cette histoire. 

The lack of the conception of development rendered 
sterile the very acquisition of knowledge of distant 
things and people ; and although there was in certain 
respects merit in introducing India and China into 
universal history, and although the criticism and satire 
of the ' four monarchies ' and of ' sacred ' history was 
to a certain extent justified, it is well to remember that 
in the notion mocked at was satisfied the legitimate 
need for understanding history in its relations with 
Christian and European civilized life ; and that if it 
had not been found possible (and it never was at that 
time) to form a more complete chain, in which were 
Arabia, India and China, and the American civilizations, 
and all the other newly discovered things, these additional 
contributions to knowledge would have remained a mere 
object for curiosity or imagination. India, China, and 
the East in general were therefore of little more use 
in the eighteenth century than to manifest an affection 
for tolerance, indeed for religious indifferentism. Those 
distant countries, in which there was no proselytizing 
frenzy, and which did not send missionaries to weary 



26o HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

Europe — though Europe did not spare them such visi- 
tations — were not treated as historical reaHties, nor did 
they obtain their place in the reality of spiritual develop- 
ment, but became longed-for ideals, countries of dream. 
Those who in our day renew praises of Asiatic tolera- 
tion, contrasting it with European intolerance, and wax 
tender over such wisdom and meekness, are not aware 
that in so doing they are repeating uselessly and in- 
opportunely what Voltaire has already done ; and if in 
this matter he did not aid the better understanding of 
history, he at any rate fulfilled a practical and moral 
function which was necessary for the conditions of his 
own time. The defective conception of development, 
and not accidental circumstances, such as the publicistic, 
journalistic, and literary tendencies of the original among 
those historians, is also the profound reason for the 
failure of contact and of union between the immense 
mass of erudition accumulated by the sixteenth-century 
philologists, and the historiography of the enlightenment. 
How were those documents and collections to be em- 
ployed in the slow and laborious development of the 
spirit, if, according to the new conception, instead of 
developing, the spirit was to leap, and had indeed 
already made a great leap and left the past far behind ? 
It was sufficient to rummage from time to time among 
them and extract some curious detail, which should 
fit in with the polemic of the moment. C*<?j/ un vaste 
magasin^ ou vous prendrez ce qui est a voire usage^ said 
Voltaire. Thus the learned and the enlightened, both 
of them children of their time, remained divided among 
themselves, the former incapable of rising to the level 
of history owing to their slight vivacity of spirit, the 
latter overrunning it owing to their too great vivacity, 
and reducing it to a form of journalism. 



THE ENLIGHTENMENT 261 

' All these limits, just because they are limits, assign 
its proper sphere to the historiography of the enlighten- 
ment, but they must not be taken as meaning that it 
had not made any progress. That historiography, 
plunged in the work at the moment most urgent, sur- 
rounded with the splendour of the truths that it was 
in the act of revealing around it, failed to see those 
limits and its own deficiencies, or saw them rarely and 
with difficulty. It was aware only that it progressed 
and progressed rapidly, nor was it wrong in this belief. 
Nor are those critics (among whom is Fueter) wrong 
who now defend it from the bad reputation that has 
befallen it and celebrate its many virtues, which we also 
have set in a clear light and have added to, and whose 
connexion and unity we have proved. Yet we must not 
leave that bad reputation unexplained, for it sounds 
far more serious than the usual depreciation by every 
historical period of the one that has preceded it, with 
the view of showing its inferiority to the present. Here, 
on the contrary, we find a particular judgment of deprecia- 
tion, pronounced even by comparison with the periods 
that preceded the enlightenment, so that this period, 
and not, for example, the Renaissance, has especially 
received the epithet of * anti-historical ' (" the anti- 
historical eighteenth century "). We find the explana- 
tion of this when we think of the dissipation then taking 
place of all symbolical veils, received from venerable 
antiquity^ and of the crude dualism and conflict which were 
being instigated at that time between history and re- 
ligion. The Renaissance was also itself an affirmation 
of human reason, but at the moment of its breaking 
with medieval tradition it was felt to be all the same 
tied to classical tradition, which gave it an appearance 
of historical consciousness (an appearance and not the 



262 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

reality). The philosophers of the Renaissance often 
invoked and placed themselves under the protection 
of the ancient philosophers, Plato against Aristotle, 
or the Greek Aristotle against the Aristotle of the com- 
mentators. The lettered men of the period sought to 
justify the new works of art and the new judgments 
upon them by appealing to the precepts of antiquity, 
although they sophisticated and subtilized what they 
found there. Philosophers, artists, and critics turned 
their shoulders upon antiquity only when and where 
no sort of conciliation was possible, and it was only the 
boldest among them who ventured to do even this. 
The ancient republics were taken as an example by the 
politicians, with Livy as their text, as the Bible was by 
the Christians. Religion, which was exhausted or had 
been extinguished in the souls of the cultured, was of 
necessity preserved for the people as an instrument of 
government, a vulgar form of philosophy : almost all 
are agreed as to this, from Machiavelli to Bruno. The 
sage legislator or the * prince * of Machiavelli and the 
enlightened despot of Voltaire, who were both of them 
idealizations of the absolute monarchies that had 
moulded Europe politically to their will, have sub- 
stantial affinities; but the sixteenth-century politician, 
expert in human weaknesses and charged with all the 
experience of the rich history of Greece and of Rome, 
studied finesse and transactions, where the enlightened 
man of the eighteenth century, encouraged by the ever 
renewed victories of the Reason, raised Reason's banner, 
and for her took his sword from the scabbard, without 
feeling the smallest necessity for covering his face with 
a mask. King Numa created a religion in order to 
deceive the people, and was praised for it by Machia- 
velli ; but Voltaire would have abused him for doing so, 



THE ENLIGHTENMENT 263 

as he abused all inventors of dogmas and promoters 
of fanaticism. What more is to be said ? The 
rationalism of the Renaissance was especially the work 
of the Italian genius, so well balanced, so careful to 
avoid excesses, so accommodating, so artistic ; enlighten- 
ment, which was especially the work of the French 
genius, was radical, consequent, apt to run into extremes, 
logistical. 

When the genius of the two countries and the two 
epochs is compared, the enlightenment is bound to appear 
anti-historical with respect to the Renaissance, which, 
owing to the comparison thus drawn and instituted 
with such an object, becomes endowed with a historical 
sense and with a sense of development which it did 
not possess, having also been essentially rationalistic 
and anti-historical, and, in a certain sense, more so than 
the enlightenment. I say more than the enlightenment, 
not only because the latter, as I have shown, greatly 
increased historical knowledge and ideas, but also 
precisely because it caused all the contradictions latent 
in the Renaissance to break out. This was an apparent 
regression in historical knowledge, but in reality it was 
an addition to life, and therefore to historical conscious- 
ness itself, as we clearly see immediately afterward. 
The triumph and the catastrophe of the enlighten- 
ment was the French Revolution ; and this was at 
the same time the triumph and the catastrophe of its 
historiography. 



VI 

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ROMANTICISM 

THE reaction manifested itself with the senti- 
mental return to the past, and with the defence 
undertaken by the politicians of old institutions 
worthy of being preserved or accorded new life. Hence 
arose two forms of historical representation, which 
certainly belong in a measure to all periods, but which 
were very vigorous at the romantic period : nostalgic 
historiography and historiography which restored. And 
since the past of their desires, which supplied the material 
for practical recommendations, was just that which 
the enlightenment and the Revolution had combated 
and overthrown — the Middle Ages and everything that 
resembled or seemed to resemble the Middle Ages — 
both kinds of history were, so to say, medievalized. 
Just as a watercourse which has been forcibly diverted 
from its natural bed noisily returns to it as soon as 
obstructions are removed, so a great sigh of joy and 
satisfaction, a warm emotion of tenderness, welled up in 
and reanimated all breasts as, after so long a rationalistic 
ascesis, they again took to themselves the old religion, 
the old national customs, regional and local, again 
entered the old houses and castles and cathedrals, sang 
again the old songs, dreamed again the old legends. 
In this tumult of sentiment we do not at first observe 
the profound and irremediable change that has taken 
place in the souls of all, borne witness to by the anxiety, 
the emotion, the pathos of that apparent return. 

It would be to belittle the nostalgic historiography 
264 



HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ROMANTICISM 265 

of the romantic movement to make it consist of certain 
special literary works, for in reality it penetrated all or 
almost all the writings of that time, like an irresistible 
current, to be found not only in lesser and poorer spirits, 
such as De Barante, nor only in the more poetically 
disposed, such as Chateaubriand, but in historians who 
present some of the most important or purely scientific 
thoughts, for example Niebuhr. The life of chivalry, 
the life of the cloister, the Crusades, the Hohenstaufen, 
the Lombard and Flemish communes, the Christian 
kings of Spain at strife with the Arabs, the Arabs them- 
selves, England divided between Saxons and Normans, 
the Switzerland of "William Tell, the chansons de geste^ 
the songs of the troubadours, Gothic architecture 
(characteristic vicissitude of a name, applied in con- 
tempt and then turned into a symbol of affection), 
became at this time the object of universal and national 
sympathy, as did the rough, ingenuous popular litera- 
ture, poetry, and art : translations or abbreviations of 
the medieval chronicles were even reprinted for the 
enjoyment of a large and eager circle of readers ; 
the first medieval museums were formed ; an attempt 
was made to restore and complete ancient churches, 
castles, and city palaces. Historiography entered into 
close relations and exchange of ideas with the new 
literary form of historical romance, which expressed 
the same nostalgia, first with Walter Scott and then 
with his innumerable followers in all countries. (This 
literary form was therefore quite different from the 
historical fiction of Manzoni, which is free from such 
sentiment and whose historical element has a moral 
foundation.) I have already remarked that this nost- 
algia was far more modern of content than at first 
supposed ; so much so that every one was attracted 



266 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

to it by the motive that most appealed to himself, whether 
religious or political, Old Catholic, mystical, monarchical, 
constitutional, communal-republican, national-indepen- 
dent, liberal-democratic, or aristocratic. Nevertheless, 
when the past was taken as a poetic theme, there 
was a risk that the idealizing tendency of the images 
would be at strife with critical rejflection : hence the 
cult of the Middle Ages, which had become a super- 
stition, came to a ridiculous end. Fueter quotes an 
acute remark of Ranke, relating to one of the last worthy 
representatives of the romantic school, Giesebrecht, 
author of the History of the German Empire^ admirer 
and extoller of the * Christian-Germanic virtues,' of the 
power and excellence of the medieval heroes. Ranke 
described all this as " at once too virile and too puerile." 
But the puerility discernible at the sources of this 
ideal current, before it falls into the comic, is rather 
the sublime puerility of the poet's dream. 

The actual modern motives, which present themselves 
as sentiments in nostalgic historiography, acquired a 
reflex form with the same or other writers, as tendencies 
to the service of which their narratives were bent. Here, 
too, it would be superfluous to give an account of all 
the various forms and specifications of these tendencies 
(which Fueter has already done admirably), from the 
persistent Rousseauism of Giovanni Miiller to Sismondi, 
or from the ideal of a free peasantry of Niebuhr, the 
ultramontane ideal of Leo, the imperialistic-medieval 
ideal of the already mentioned Giesebrecht and Ficker, 
the old liberal of Raumer, the neo-liberal of Rotteck 
and Gervinus, the anglicizing of Guizot and Dahlmann, 
or the democratic ideal of Michelet, to the neo-Guelfish 
ideal of Troya and Balbo and Father Tosti, to the 
Prussian hegemony of Droysen and of Treitschke, and 



HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ROMANTICISM 267 

so on. But all of these, and other historians with a 
particular bias, lean, with rare exceptions, on the past, 
and find the justification of their bias in the dialectic 
of tradition or in tradition itself. Nobody any longer 
cared to compose by the light of abstract reason alone. 
The extreme typical instance is afforded by the socialistic 
school, which took the romantic form in the person of 
its chief representative, Marx, who endowed it with 
historiographical and scientific value. His work was 
in complete opposition to the socialistic ideals that had 
appeared in the eighteenth century, and he therefore 
boasted that they had passed from the state of being 
a Utopia to that of a science. His science was nothing 
less than historical necessity attributed to the new era 
that he prophesied, and materialism itself no longer 
wished to be the naturalistic materialism of a d'Holbach 
or a Helv^tius, but presented itself as * historical 
materialism.* 

If nostalgic historiography is poetry and that with 
a purpose is practical and political, the historiography, 
the true historiography, of romanticism is not to be 
placed in either of the two, in so far as it is considered 
an epoch in the history of thought. Certainly, poetry 
and practice arose from a thought and led to a thought 
as its material or problem : the French Revolution 
was certainly not the cause or the effect of a philosophy, 
but both the cause and the effect, a philosophy in the 
act, born from and generating the life that was then 
developed. But thought in the form of thought, and 
not in the form of sentimental love of the past or effort 
to revive a false past, is what determines the scientific 
character of that historiography, which we desire to 
set in a clear light. And it reacted in the form 
of thought against the thought of the enlightenment, 



268 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

so crudely dualistic, by opposing to it the conception 
of development. 

Not indeed that this concept was something entirely 
new, which had then burst forth in bud for the first 
time : no speculative conception that is really such 
can be absent at one time and appear at another. The 
difference lies in this, that at a given period scientific 
problems seem to apply to one rather than to another 
aspect of thought, which is always present in its totality. 
So that when we say that the conception of development 
was absent from antiquity and from the eighteenth 
century, we utter a hyperbole. There are good reasons 
for this hyperbole, but it remains a hyperbole and 
should not be taken literally and understood materially. 
Nor are we to believe that there was no suspicion or 
anticipation of the important scientific conception of 
development prior to the romantic period. Traces 
of it may be found in the pantheism of the great 
philosophers of the Renaissance, and especially in Bruno, 
and in mysticism itself, in so far as it included pantheism, 
and yet more distinctly in the reconstruction of the 
bare bones of the theological conception with the con- 
ception of the course of historical events as a gradual 
education of the human race, in which the successive 
revelations should be the communication of books of 
a gradually less and less elementary nature, from the 
first Hebrew scriptures to the Gospels and to the re- 
visions of the Gospels. Lessing offers an example of 
this. Nor were the theorists of the enlightenment 
always so terribly dualistic as those that I have mentioned, 
but here and there one of them, such as Turgot, although 
he did not altogether abandon the presupposition as 
to epochs of decadence, yet recognized the progress 
of Christianity over antiquity and of modern times 



HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ROMANTICISM 269 

over Christianity, and attempted even to trace the line 
of development passing through the three ages, the 
mythological, the metaphysical, and the scientific. 
Other thinkers, like Montesquieu, noticed the relativity 
of institutions to customs and to periods; others, like 
Rousseau, attached great importance to the strength 
of sentiment. Enlightenment had also its adversaries 
during its own period, not only as represented by poli- 
tical abstraction and fatuous optimism (such as that of 
Galiani, for instance), but also in more important respects, 
destined later to form the special subject of criticism, 
such as contempt for tradition, for religion, and for 
poetry and arid naturalism. Hence the smile of 
Hamann at the blind faith of Voltaire and of Hume in 
the Newtonian astronomical doctrines and at their lack 
of sense for moral doctrines. He held that a revival 
of poetry and a linking of it with history were necessary, 
and considered history to be (here he was just the opposite 
of Bodin) not the easiest but the most difficult of all 
mental labours. But in the Scienza nuova of Vico 
(1725) was to be found a very rich and organic antici- 
pation of romantic thought (as should now be universally 
recognized and known). Vico criticized the enlighten- 
ment only in its beginnings (when it was still only 
natural jurisprudence and Cartesianism), yet he never- 
theless penetrated more deeply than others who came 
after him into its hidden motives and measured more 
accurately its logical and practical consequences. Thus 
he opposed to the superficial contempt for the past in 
the name of abstract reason the unfolding of the human 
mind in history, as sense, imagination, and intellect, 
as the divine or animal age, the heroic age, and the 
human age. He held further that no human age was 
in the wrong, for each had its own strength and beauty. 



270 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

and each was the effect of its predecessor and the 
necessary preparation for the one to follow, aristocracy 
for democracy, democracy for monarchy, each one 
appearing at the right moment, or as the justice of that 
moment. 

The conception of development did not, however, 
in the romantic period, remain the thought of a solitary 
thinker without an audience, but broadened until 
it became a general conviction ; it did not appear 
timidly shadowed forth, or contradictorily affirmed, but 
took on body, coherence, and vigour, and dominated 
spirits. It is the formative principle of the idealist 
philosophy, which culminated in the system of Hegel. 
Few there were who resisted its strength, and these, 
like Herbart, were still shut up in pre-Kantian dogma- 
tism, or tried to resist it and are more or less tinged 
with it, as is the case with Schopenhauer and yet more 
with Comte and later with positivistic evolutionism. 
It gives its intellectual backbone to the whole of his- 
toriography (with the exception here too of lingerers 
and reactionaries), and that historiography corrects for 
it, in greater or less measure, the same one-sided 
tendencies which came to it from the sentimental and 
political causes already described, from tenderness 
for the near past or for "the good old times," and for 
the Middle Ages. The whole of history is now under- 
stood as necessary development, and is therefore im- 
plicitly, and more or less explicitly, all redeemed ; it 
is all learned with the feeling that it is sacred, a feeling 
reserved in the Middle Ages for those parts of it only 
which represented the opposition of God to the power 
of the devil. Thus the conception of development 
was extended to classical antiquity, and then, with the 
increase of knowledge and of attention, to Oriental 



HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ROMANTICISM 271 

civilizations. Thus the Romans, the lonians, the 
Dorians, the Egyptians, and the Indians got back their 
life and were justified and loved in their turn almost 
as much as the world of chivalry and the Christian world 
had been loved. But the logical extension of the con- 
ception did not find any obstacle among the philosophers 
and historians, even in the repugnance that was felt 
for the times to which modern times were opposed, 
such as the eighteenth century. The spectacle was 
witnessed of the consecration of Jacobinism and of the 
French Revolution in the very books of their adversaries, 
Hegel, for instance, finding in those events both the 
triumph and the death, the one not less than the other, 
the * triumphant death * of the modern abstract sub- 
jectivity, - inaugurated by Descartes. Not only did 
the adversaries, but also the executioners and their 
victims, make peace, and Socrates, the martyr of free 
thought and the victim of intolerance, such as he was 
understood to be by the intellectualists of the eighteenth 
century and those who superstitiously repeat them in 
our own day, was condemned to the death that he had 
well deserved, in the name of History, which does not 
admit of spiritual revolutions without tragedies. The 
drafter, too, of the Manifesto of the Communists^ as he was 
hastening on the business of putting an end to the 
burgess class, both with his prayers and with his works, 
gave vent to a warm and grandiose eulogium of the work 
achieved by the burgess class, and in so doing showed 
himself to be the faithful child of romantic thought ; 
because, for anyone who held to the ideology of the 
eighteenth century, capitalism and the burgess class 
should have appeared to be nothing but distortions due 
to ignorance, stupidity, and egoism, unworthy of any 
praise beyond a funeral oration. The passions of the 



272 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

greater part of those historians were most inflammable, 
not less than those of the enlightened, yet satire, sarcasm, 
invective, at least among the superior intellects, vividly 
encircled the historical understanding of the time, but 
did not oppress or negate it. The general impression 
experienced from those narratives is that of a serious 
effort to render justice to all, and we owe it to the dis- 
cipline thus imparted to the minds and souls of the 
thinkers and historians of romanticism that it is only 
the least cultivated or most fanatical among the priests 
and Catholics in general who continue to curse Voltaire 
and the eighteenth century as the work of the devil. 
In the same way, it is only vulgar democrats and anti- 
clericals, akin to the former in their anachronism and 
the rest, who treat the reaction, the restoration, and 
the Middle Ages with equal grossness. Enlighten- 
ment and the Jacobinism connected with it was a reli- 
gion, as we have shown, and when it died it left behind 
it survivals or superstitions. 

To conceive history as development is to conceive 
it as history of ideal values, the only ones that have 
value, and it was for this reason that in the romantic 
period there was an ever increasing multiplication of 
those histories which had already increased to so con- 
siderable an extent in the preceding period. But their 
novelty did not consist in their external multiplication, 
but in their internal maturation, which corrected those 
previously composed, consisting either of learned col- 
lections of disconnected items of information, or judg- 
ments indeed, but judgments based upon an external 
model, which claimed to be constructed by pure reason 
and was in reality constructed by arbitrary and capricious 
abstraction and imagination. And now the history of 
poetry and of literature is no longer measured according 



HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ROMANTICISM 273 

to the standard of the Roman-humanistic ideal, or 
according to the classical ideal of the age of Louis XIV, 
or of the ratiocinative and prosaic ideal of the eighteenth 
century, but discovers by degrees its own measure in 
itself, and beginning with the first attempts of Herder, 
of the Schlegels, and then of Villemain, of Sainte-Beuve, 
and of Gervinus, and for antiquity of Wolf and Miiller, 
finally reaches the high standard represented by the 
History of Italian Literature of de Sanctis. Suddenly 
the history of art feels itself embarrassed by the too 
narrow ideal of Lessing and of Winckelmann, and there 
is a movement toward colour, toward landscape, toward 
pre-Hellenic and post-Hellenic art, toward the romantic, 
the Gothic, the Renaissance, and the baroque, a move- 
ment that extends from Meyer and Hirth to Rumohr, 
Kluger, Schnaase, till it reaches Burckhardt and Ruskin. 
It also tries here and there to break down the barriers 
of the schools and to attain the really artistic personality 
of the artists. The history of philosophy has its great 
crisis with Hegel, who leads it from the abstract sub- 
jectivism of the followers of Kant to objectivity, and 
recognizes the only true existence of philosophy to 
consist of the history of thought, considered in its 
entirety, without neglecting any one of its forms. Zeller, 
Fischer, and Erdmann in Germany, Cousin and his 
school in France, Spaventa in Italy, follow Hegel in 
such objective research. The like takes place in the 
history of religion, which tries to adopt intrinsic criteria 
of judgment, after Spittler and Planck, the last repre- 
sentatives of the rationalistic school, with Marheinecke, 
Neander, Hase, and finds a peculiarly scientific form 
with Strauss, Baur, and the Tubingen school ; and from 
Eichhorn to Savigny, Gans, and Lassalle in the history 
of rights. The conception of the State always yields 



274 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

the leadership more and more to that of the nation in 
the history called political, and * nationality ' substi- 
tutes the names of ' humanity,' ' liberty,' and ' equality,* 
and all the other ideas of the preceding age that once 
were full of radiance, but are now dimmed. This 
nationalism has wrongly been looked upon as a regression 
in respect of that universalism and cosmopolitanism, 
because (notwithstanding its well-known sentimental 
exaggerations) it notably assists the concrete conception 
of the universal living only in its historical creations, 
such as nations, which are both products and factors 
of its development. And the value of Europeanism is 
revived as the result of this acquisition of consciousness 
of the value of nations. It had been too much trampled 
upon during the period of the enlightenment, owing 
to the naturalistic spirit which dominated at that time, 
and to the reaction taking place against the historical 
schemes of antiquity and Christianity, although it was 
surely evident that history written by Europeans could 
not but be ' Europocentric,' and that it is only in 
relation to the course of Graeco-Roman civilization, 
which was Christian and Occidental, that the civiliza- 
tions developed along other lines become actual and 
comprehensible to us, provided always that we do not 
wish to change history into an exhibition of the different 
types of civilization, with a prize for the best of them ! 
The difference is also made clear for the same reason 
between history and pre-history, between the history 
of man and the history of nature, which had been ille- 
gitimately linked by the materialists and the naturalists. 
This is to be found even in the works of Herder, who 
retains a good many of the elements of the century of 
his birth mingled with those of the new period. But 
it is above all in romantic historiography that we observe 



HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ROMANTICISM 275 

the search for and very often the happy realization of 
an organic Hnking together of all particular histories 
of spiritual values, by relating religious, philosophical,/ 
poetical, artistic, juridical, and moral facts as a function' 
of a single motive of development. It then becomes 
a commonplace that a literature cannot be understood 
without understanding ideas and customs, or politics 
without philosophy, or (as was realized rather later) 
rights and customs and ideas without economy. And 
it is worth while recording as we pass by that there is 
hardly one of these histories of values which has not 
been previously presented or sketched by Vico, together 
with the indication of their intrinsic unity. Histories 
of poetry, histories of myth, of rights, of languages, of 
constitutions, of explicative or philosophical reason, 
all are in Vico, although sometimes wrapped up in the 
historical or sociological epoch with which each one 
of them was particularly connected. Even modern 
biography (which illustrates what the individual does 
and suffers in relation to the mission which he fulfils 
and to the aspect of the Idea which becomes actual in him) 
has its first or one of its first notable monuments in the 
autobiography of Vico — that is to say, in the history of 
the works which Providence commanded and guided 
him to accomplish *' in diverse ways that seemed to be 
obstacles, but were opportunities." 

This transformation of biography does not imply 
failure to recognize individuality, but is, on the contrary, 
its elevation, for it finds its true meaning in its relation 
with the universal, as the universal its concreteness 
in the individual. And indeed individualizing power, 
perception of physiognomies, of states of the soul, of 
the various forms of the ideas, sense of the differences 
of times and places, may be said to show themselves 



276 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

for the first time in romantic historiography. That 
is to say, they do not show themselves rarely or as by 
accident, nor any longer in the negative and summary 
form of opposition between new and old, civil and 
barbarous, patriotic and extraneous. It does not mean 
anything that some of those historians lost themselves 
(though this happened rarely) in an abstract dialectic 
of ideas, and that others more frequently allowed ideas 
to be submerged in the external picturesqueness of 
customs and anecdotes, because we find exaggerations, 
one-sidedness, lack of balance, at all periods and in all 
progress of thought. Nor is the accusation of great 
importance that the colouring of times and places pre- 
ferred by the romantics was false, because the impor- 
tant thing was precisely this attempt to colour, whether 
the result were happy or the reverse (if the latter, the 
picture had to be coloured again, but always coloured). 
A further reason for this is that, as has been already 
admitted, there were fancies and tendencies at work 
in romanticism beyond true and proper historiography, 
which bestowed upon the times and places illustrated 
that imaginary and exaggerated colouring suggested 
by the various sentiments and interests. History, 
which is thought, was sometimes idealized at this period 
as an imaginary living again in the past, and people 
asked of history to be carried back into the old castles 
and market-places of the Middle Ages ; for their enjoy- 
ment they asked to see the personages of the time in their 
own proper clothes and as they moved about, to hear 
them speak the language, with the accent of the time, 
to be made contemporary with the facts and to acquire 
them with the ingenuous spirit of a contemporary. But 
to do this is not only impossible for thought, but also 
for art, because art too surpasses life, and it would be 



HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ROMANTICISM 277 

something useless, because it is not desired, for what 
man really desires is to reproduce in imagination and 
to rethink the past from the present, not to tear him- 
self away from the present and fall back into the dead 
past. Certainly this last was an illusion, proper to 
several romantics (who for that matter have their suc- 
cessors in our own day), and in so far as it was an illusion 
either remained a sterile effort or diffused itself in a 
lyrical sigh ; but an illusion of that kind was one of 
many aspects and did not form an essential part of 
romantic historiography. 

We also owe it to romanticism that a relation was 
established for the first time and a fusion effected 
between the learned and the historians, between those 
who sought out material and thinkers. This, as we 
have said, had not happened in the eighteenth century, 
nor, to tell the truth, before it, in the great epochs of 
erudition of Italian or Alexandrian humanism, for then 
antiquaries and politicians each followed their own 
path, indifferent to one another, and the only political 
ideal that sometimes gleamed from the bookshelves of 
the antiquary (as Fueter acutely observes of Flavius 
Blondus) was that of a government which by ensuring 
calm should permit the learned to follow their peaceful 
avocations 1 But the watchword of romantic historio- 
graphy was anticipated in respect to this matter also 
by Vico, in his formula of the union of philosophy with 
philology, and of the reciprocal conversion of the true 
with the certain, of the idea with the fact. This formula 
proves (we give it passing mention) that the historical 
saying of Manzoni, to the effect that Vico should be 
united with Muratori, was not altogether historically 
exact — that is to say, philosophy with erudition, for 
Vico had already united these two things, and their 



278 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

union constitutes the chief value of his work. Never- 
theless, notwithstanding its inaccuracy, the saying of 
Manzoni also proves how romantic historiography had 
noted the intimate connexion that prevails between 
erudition and thought in history, which is the living 
and thinking again of the document that has been pre- 
served or restored by erudition, and indeed demands 
erudition that it may be sought out and prepared. 
Neither did romanticism limit itself to stating this claim 
in the abstract, but really created the type of the 
philologist-thinker (who was sometimes also a poet), 
from Niebuhr to Mommsen, from Thierry to Fustel de 
Coulanges, from Troya to Balbo or Tosti. Then for 
the first time were the great collections and repertories 
of the erudition of the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries valued at their true worth ; then were new 
collections promoted, supplementary to or correcting 
them according to criteria that were ever more rigorous 
in relation to the subject and to the greater know- 
ledge and means at disposal. Thus arose the work 
known as the Monumenta Germanic historica and the 
German philological school (which was once the last 
and became the first), the one a model of under- 
takings of this sort, the other of the disciplines relating 
to them, for the rest of Europe. The philological 
claim of the new historiography, aided by the sentiment 
of nationality, also gave life in our Italy to those histori- 
cal societies, to those collections of chronicles, of laws, 
of charters, of * historical archives * or reviews, institu- 
tions with which historiographical work is concerned in 
our day. A notable example of the power to promote 
the most patient philology inspired with purely historical 
needs is to be found, among others, in the Corpus 
inscriptionum latinarum, conceived and carried out by a 



HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ROMANTICISM 279 

historian endowed with, the passionate energy and the 
synthetic mind of a Mommsen. In the eighteenth 
century (with one or two very rare and partial exceptions) 
historians disdained parchment and in-foHos, or opened 
them impatiently, hibentes et jugientes ; but in the nine- 
teenth century no serious spirit dared to affirm any 
longer that it was possible to compose history without 
accurate, scrupulous, meticulous study of the documents 
upon which it is to be founded. 

The pragmatic histories of the last centuries, 
therefore, melted away at the simple touch of these 
new historiographical convictions, rather than owing 
to direct and open criticism or polemic. The word 
' pragmatic,' which used to be a title of honour, began 
to be pronounced with a tinge of contempt, to designate 
an inadequate form of historical thought, and the 
historians of the enlightenment fell into discredit, not 
only Voltaire and the French, but the Humes, the 
Robertsons, and other English historians. They 
appeared now to be quite without colour, lacking in 
historical sense, their minds fixed only on the political 
aspect of things, superficial, vainly attempting to ex- 
plain great events by the intentions of individuals and 
by means of little things or single details. The theory, 
too, of history as the orator and teacher of virtue and 
prudential maxims also disappeared. This theory had 
enjoyed a long and vigorous life during Graeco-Roman 
antiquity and again from the Renaissance onward (when 
I say that all these things disappeared, the exception 
of the fossils is always to be understood, for these per- 
sisted at that time and persist in our own day, with the 
air of being alive). The attitude of the Christian spirit 
toward history was resumed. This spirit contemplates 
it as a single process, which does not repeat itself, as 



2 8o HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

the work of God, which teaches directly by means of 
His presence, not as matter that exemplifies abstract 
teaching, extraneous to itself. The word * pragmatic ' 
was indeed pronounced with a smile from that time 
onward, as were the formulas of historia magister vit<e 
or that directed ad bene heateque vivendum ; let him 
who will believe these formulas — that is to say, he who 
echoes traditional thoughts without rethinking them 
and is satisfied with traditional and vulgar conceptions. 
What is the use of history .? " History itself," was the 
answer, and truly that is not a little thing. 

The new century glorified itself with the title of 
* the century of history,' owing to its new departures, 
which were born or converged in one. It had deified 
and at the same time humanized history, as had never 
been done before, and had made of it a centre of reality 
and of thought. That title of honour should be con- 
firmed, if not to the whole of the nineteenth century, 
then to its romantic or idealistic period. But this 
confirmation should not prevent our observing, with 
equal clearness, the limit of that historicity, without 
which it would not be possible to understand its later 
and further advance. History was then at once deified 
and humanized ; but did the divinity and humanity 
truly flow together in one, or was there not at bottom 
some separation between the two of them } Was the 
disagreement between ancient worldly thought and 
ultramundane Christian thought really healed, or did 
it not present itself again in a new form, though this 
form was attenuated and more critical intellectually ? 
And which of the two elements prevailed in this dis- 
agreement in its abstractness, the human or rather the 
divine ? 

These questions suggest the answer, which is further 



HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ROMANTICISM 281 

suggested by a memory familiar to all, namely, that 
the romantic period was not only the splendid age 
of the great evolutionary histories, but also the fatal 
age of the philosophies of history^ the transcendental 
histories. And indeed, although the thought of im- 
manence had grown gradually more and more rich 
and profound during the Renaissance and the enlighten- 
ment, and that of transcendency ever more evanescent, 
the first had not for that reason absorbed the second 
in itself, but had merely purified and rationalized it, 
as Hellenic philosophy and Christian theology had 
tried to do in their own ways in their own times. In 
the romantic period, purification and rationalization 
continue, and here was the mistake as well as the merit 
of romanticism, for it was no longer a question of setting 
right that ancient opinion, but of radically inverting and 
remaking it. The transcendental conception of history 
was no longer at that time called revelation and apoca- 
lypse, but philosophy of history, a title taken from the 
enlightenment (principally from Voltaire), although it 
no longer had the meaning formerly attributed to it 
of history examined with an unprejudiced or philo- 
sophical spirit adorned with moral and political 
reflections, but the meaning, altogether different, of 
a philosophical search of the sphere above or below 
that of history — in fact, of a theological search, which 
remained theological, however lay or speculative it 
may have been. And since a search of this sort always 
leads to a rationalized mythology, there is no reason 
why the name of ' mythology ' should not be extended 
to the philosophy of history, or the name of * philosophy 
of history' to mythology, as I have extended it, calling 
all transcendental conceptions of history * philosophy of 
history,' for they all separate the fact and the idea, the 



2 82 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

event and its explication, action and end, the world 
and God. And since the philosophy of history is 
transcendental in its internal structure, it is not sur- 
prising that it showed itself to be such in all the very 
varied forms that it assumed in the romantic period, 
even among philosophers as avid of immanence as 
Hegel, a great destroyer of Platonism, who yet remained 
to a considerable extent engaged in it, so tenacious is 
that enemy which every thinker carries in himself 
and which he should tear from his heart, yet cannot 
resist. 

But without entering into a particular account of the 
assumptions made by the romantics and idealists in the 
construction of their * philosophies of history,' it will 
be sufficient to observe the consequences, in order to 
point out the transcendental tendency of their con- 
structions. These were such as to compromise romantic 
histories in the method and to damage them in the 
execution, though they were at first so vigorously con- 
ceived as a unity of philosophy and philology. One 
of the consequences was precisely the falling again into 
contempt of erudition among those very people who 
adopted and promoted it, and on other occasions a re- 
commendation of it in words and a contempt of it in 
deeds. This contradictory attitude was troubled with an 
evil conscience, so much so that its recommendations 
sound but little sincere, the contempt timid, when it 
shows itself, though it is more often concealed. Never- 
theless one discovers fleeting words of revelation among 
these tortuosities and pretences, such as that of an a -priori 
history (Fichte, Schelling, Krause, and, to a certain extent 
at least, Hegel), which should be true history, deduced 
from the pure concepts, or rendered divine in some 
vision of the seer of Patmos, a history which should 



HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ROMANTICISM 283 

be more or less different from the confusion of human 
events and facts, as philosophical history, leaving 
outside it as refuse a merely narrative history, which 
should serve as raw material or as text for the sermons 
and precepts of the moralists and politicians. And 
we see rising from the bosom of a philosophy, which 
had tried to make history of itself, by making philosophy 
also history (proof that the design had not been really 
translated into act), the distinction between philosophy 
and history, between the historical and the philosophical 
way of thinking, and the mutual antipathy and mutual 
unfriendliness of the two orders of researchers. The 
* professional ' historians were obliged to defend them- 
selves against their progenitors (the philosophers), and 
they ended by losing all pity for them, by denying that 
they were philosophers and treating them as intruders 
and charlatans. 

Unpleasantness and ill-will were all the more in- 
evitable in that the * philosophers of history ' — that is 
to say, the historians obsessed with transcendency — 
did not always remain content (nor could they do so, 
speaking strictly) with the distinction between philo- 
sophical and narrative history, and, as was natural, 
attempted to harmonize the two histories, to make the 
facts harmonize with the schemes which they had 
imagined or deduced. With this purpose in view, they 
found themselves led to use violence toward facts, in 
favour of their system, and this resulted in certain most 
important parts being cut out, in a Procrustean manner, 
and in others that were accepted being perverted to 
suit a meaning that was not genuine but imposed upon 
them. Even the chronological divisions, which formed 
a merely practical aid to narratives, were tortured (as 
was the custom in the Middle Ages) that they might 



2 84 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

be elevated to the rank of ideal divisions. And not 
only was the light of truth extinguished in the pursuit 
of these caprices, not only were individual sympathies 
and antipathies introduced (take as an instance typical 
of all of them the idealization of Hellas and of this or 
that one of the Hellenic races), but there appeared a 
thing yet more personally offensive to the victims — 
that is to say, there penetrated into history, under the 
guise of lofty philosophy, the personal loves and hates 
of the historian, in so far as he was a party man, a church- 
man, or belonged to this or that people, state, or race. 
This ended in the invention of Germanism, the crown 
and perfection of the human race, a Germanism which, 
claiming to be the purest expression of Arianism, would 
have restored the idea of the elect people, and have one 
day undertaken the journey to the East. Thus were 
in turn celebrated semi-absolute monarchy as the 
absolute form of states, speculative Lutheranism as 
the absolute form of religion, and other suchlike vain- 
glorious vaunts, with which the pride of Germany 
oppressed the European peoples and indeed the whole 
world, and thus exacted payment in a certain way for 
the new philosophy with which Germany had endowed 
the world. But it must not be imagined that the pride 
of Germany was not combated with its own arms, for 
if the English speculated but little and the French were 
too firm in their belief in the GestaDeiper Francos (become 
the gestes of reason and civilization), yet the peoples who 
found themselves in less happy conditions, and felt 
more keenly the censure of inferiority or of senility 
thus inflicted upon them, reacted : Gioberti wrote a 
Primato d'ltalta^ and Ciezkowski a Paternostro, which 
foretold the future primacy of the Slavonic people and 
more especially of the Poles. 



HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ROMANTICISM 285 

Yet another consequence of the ' philosophies of 
history* was the reflourishing of 'universal histories,' 
in the fallacious signification of complete histories of 
humanity, indeed of the cosmos, which the Middle 
Ages had narrated in the chronicles ah origine mundi 
and de duahus civitatibus and de quattuor imperiis, and the 
Renaissance and enlightenment had reduced to mere 
vulgar compilations, finding the centre for its own 
interest elsewhere. The imagines mundi returned with 
the philosophies of history, and such they were them- 
selves, transcendental universal histories, with the 
* philosophy of nature ' belonging to them. The suc- 
cession of the nations there took the place of the series 
of empires : to each nation, as formerly to each empire, 
was assigned a special function, which once fulfilled, 
it disappeared or fell to pieces, having passed on the 
lamp of life, which must not pass through the hands of 
any nation more than once. The German nation was 
to play there the part of the Roman Empire, which 
should never die, but exist perpetually, or until the 
consummation of the ages and the Kingdom of God. 

To develop the various forms of the philosophy of 
history would aid in making clear the internal contra- 
dictions of the doctrine and in ascribing the reasons 
for the introduction of certain corrections for the purpose 
of doing away with the contradictions in question, 
but which in so doing introduced others. And in 
making an examination of this kind a special place 
should be reserved for Vico, who offers a * philosophy 
of history ' of a very complex sort, which on the one 
side does not negate, but passes by in silence the Chris- 
tian and medieval conception (as it does not deny 
St Augustine's conception of the two cities or of the 
elect and Gentile people, but only seriously examines the 



2 86 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

history of the latter), while on the other side it resumes 
the ancient Oriental motive of the circles (courses and 
recourses), but understands the course as growth and 
development, and the recourse as a dialectical return, 
which on the other hand does not seem to give rise to 
progress, although it does not seem to exclude it, and 
also does not exclude the autonomy of the free will 
or the exception of contingency. In this conception 
the Middle Ages and antiquity ferment, producing 
romantic and modern thought.^ But in the romantic 
period the idea of the circle (which yet contained a 
great mental claim that demanded satisfaction) gave 
place to the idea of a linear course, taken from 
Christianity and from progress to an end, which con- 
cludes with a certain state as limit or with entrance into 
a paradise of indefinite progress, of incessant joy without 
sorrow. In a conception of this kind there is at one 
time a mixture of theology and of illuminism, as in 
Herder, at another an attempt at a history according to 
the ages of life and the forms of the spirit, as with Fichte 
and his school ; then again the idea realizes its logical 
ideal in time, as in Hegel, or the shadow of a God 
reappears, as in the deism of Laurent and of several 
others, or the God is that of the old religion, but 
modernized, noble, judicious, liberal, as in moderate 
Catholicism and Protestantism. And since the course 
has necessarily an end in all these schemes, announced 
and described and therefore already lived and passed 
by, attempts to prolong, to prorogue, or to vary that 
end have not been wanting, such personages as the 
Abbots Gioacchini arising and calling themselves the 
* Slav apocalyptics ' or by some other name, and adding 

^ The exposition and criticism of Vico's thought are copiously dealt 
with in the second volume of my Saggi filosofici i La filosofia di Giam- 
battista Vico (Bari, 191 1). 



HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ROMANTICISM 287 

new eras to those described. But this did not change 
anything in the general conception. And there was no 
change effected in it by the philosophies of history of 
the second Schelling, for example, which are usually 
called irrationalisticj or of the pessimists, because it 
is clear that the decadence which they describe is a 
progress in the opposite sense, a progress in evil and in 
suffering, having its end in the acme of evil and pain, 
or leading indeed to a redemption and then becoming 
a progress toward the good. But if the idea of circles, 
which repeat themselves identically, oppresses historical 
consciousness, which is the consciousness of perennial 
individuality and diversity, this idea of progress to an 
end oppresses it in another way, because it declares that 
all the creations of history are imperfect, save the last, 
in which history comes to a standstill and which there- 
fore alone has absolute value, and which thus takes 
away from the value of reality in favour of an abstraction, 
from existence in favour of the inexistent. And both 
of these — that is to say, all the philosophies of history, 
in whatever way determined — lay in ambush to over- 
whelm the conceptions of development and the increase 
in historiographical value obtained through it by 
romanticism ; and when this injury did not occur 
(as in several notable historians, who narrated history 
admirably, although they professed to obey the rules 
of the abstract philosophy of history, which they saluted 
from near or far, but took care not to introduce into their 
narratives), it was a proof that the contradiction had not 
been perceived, or at least perceived as we now perceive 
it, in its profound dissonance. It was a sign that 
romanticism too had problems upon which it laboured 
long and probed deeply, and others upon which it did 
not work at all or only worked a little and kept waiting, 



288 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

satisfying them more or less. History too, like the 
individual who works, does ' one thing at a time,' 
neglecting or allowing to run on with the help of 
slight provisional improvements the problems to which 
it cannot for the time being attend, but ready to direct 
full attention to them when its hands are free. 



VII 
THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF POSITIVISM 

THE philosophies of history offended the historical 
consciousness in three points, as to which it 
has every right to be jealous: the integrity of 
historical events, the unity of the narration with the docu- 
ment, and the immanence of development. And the 
opposition to the * philosophy of history,' and to the 
historiography of romanticism in general, broke out 
precisely at these three points, and was often violent. 
This opposition had at bottom a common motive, as 
has been shown clearly by the frequent sympathy and 
fraternizing among those who represent it, though dis- 
sensions as to details are common among them. It is, 
however, best to consider it in its triplicity for reasons 
of clearness, and to describe it as that of the historians^ 
the philologists^ and the philosophers. 

To the historians, by whom we mean those who had 
a special disposition for the investigation of particular 
facts rather than theories, and a greater acquaintance 
with and practice of historical than speculative literature, 
is due the saying that history should be history and not 
philosophy. Not that they ventured to deny philosophy, 
for on the contrary they protested their reverence for it 
and even for religion and theology, and condescended to 
make an occasional rapid and cautious excursion into those 
waters ; but they generally desired to steer their way 
through the placid gulfs of historical truth, avoiding the 
tempestuous oceans of the other discipline : philosophy 
was relegated to the horizon of their works. Nor did they 

T 289 



2 90 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

even contest, at least in principle, the right of existence 
of those grandiose constructions of * universal history,' but 
they recommended and preferred national or otherwise 
monographical histories, which can be sufficiently studied 
in their particulars, substituting for universal histories 
collections of histories of states and of peoples. And 
since romanticism had introduced into those universal 
histories and into the national histories themselves its 
various practical tendencies (which the philosophy of his- 
tory had then turned into dogmas), the historians placed 
abstention from national and party tendencies upon their 
programme, although they reserved the right of making 
felt their patriotic and political aspirations, but, as they 
said, without for that reason altering the narrative of the 
facts, which were supposed to move along independently 
of their opinions, or chime in with them spontaneously 
in the course of their natural development. And since 
passion and the philosophic judgment had been con- 
fused and mutually contaminated in romanticism, the 
abstention was extended also to the judgment as to 
the quality of the facts narrated ; the reality and not 
the value of the fact being held to be the province of 
the historian, appeal being made to what theorists and 
philosophers had thought about it, where a more pro- 
found consideration of the problem was demanded. 
History should not be either German or French, Catholic 
or Protestant, but it should also not pretend to apply a 
more ample conception to the solution of these or similar 
antitheses, as the philosophers of history had tried to do, 
but rather should neutralize them all in a wise scepticism 
or agnosticism, and attenuate them in a form of exposi- 
tion conducted in the tone of a presidential summing-up, 
where careful attention is paid to the opinions of opposed 
parties and courtesy is observed toward all. There was 



HISTORIOGRAPHY OF POSITIVISM 291 

diplomacy in this, and it is not astonishing that many 
diplomatists or disciples of diplomacy should collaborate 
in this form of history, and that the greatest of all the 
historians of this school, Leopold Ranke, in whom are 
to be found all the traits that we have described, should 
have had a special predilection for diplomatic sources. 
He always, indeed, combated philosophy, especially the 
Hegelian philosophy, and greatly contributed to dis- 
credit it with the historians, but he did this decorously, 
carefully avoiding the use of any word that might sound 
too rough or too strong, professing the firm conviction 
that the hand of God shows itself in history, a hand that 
we cannot grasp with ours, but which touches our face 
and informs us of its action. He completed his long 
and very fruitful labours in the form of monographs, 
avoiding universal constructions. When, at the end 
of his life, he set to work to compose a Weltgeschichte, 
he carefully separated it from the universe, declaring 
that it would have been *' lost in phantasms and philoso- 
phemes " had he abandoned the safe ground of national 
histories and sought for any other sort of universality 
than that of nations, which " acting upon one another, 
appear one after the other and constitute a living whole." 
In his first book he protested with fine irony that he was 
not able to accept the grave charge of judging the past 
or of instructing the present as to the future, which had 
been assigned to history, but he felt himself capable only 
of showing " how things really had happened " {wte es 
eigentlkh gewesen) ; this was his object in all his work, 
and he held fast to it, thus culling laurels unobtainable 
by others, attaining even to the writing of the history 
of the popes of the period of the Counter-Reformation, 
although he was a Lutheran and remained so all his life. 
This history was received with favour in all Catholic 



2 92 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

countries. His greatest achievement was to write of 
French history in a manner that did not displease the 
French. A writer of the greatest elegance, he was able 
to steer between the rocks, without even letting appear 
his own religious or philosophical convictions, and with- 
out ever finding himself under the obligation of forming 
a definite resolution, and in any case never pressing too 
hard upon the conceptions themselves to which he had 
recourse, such as * historical ideas,' the perpetual struggle 
between Church and State, and the conception of the 
State. Ranke was the ideal and the master to many 
historians within, and to some without, his own country. 
But even without his direct influence, the type of history 
that he represented germinated everywhere, a little 
earlier or later according to position and to the calming 
down of the great political passions and philosophical 
fervour in the different countries. This took place, for 
instance, in France earlier than in Italy, where the 
idealistic philosophy and the national movement made 
their strength felt in historiography after 1848, and even 
up to i860. But the type of history which I should 
almost be disposed to baptize with the name of * diplo- 
matic,' taking seriously the designation that I had at 
first employed jocosely, still meets with success among 
the moderately disposed, who are lovers of culture, but 
do not wish to become infected with party passions 
or to rack their brains with philosophical speculations: 
but, as may be imagined, it is not always treated 
with the intelligence, the balance, and the finesse of a 
Leopold Ranke. 

The ambition of altogether rejecting the admission 
of thought into history, which has been lacking to 
the diplomatic historians (because they were without the 
necessary innocence for such an ambition), was, on the 



HISTORIOGRAPHY OF POSITIVISM 293 

other hand, possessed by the philologists, a most innocent 
group. They were all the more disposed to abound 
in this sense, since their opinion of themselves, which 
had formerly been most modest, had been so notably 
increased, owing to the high degree of perfection attained 
by research into chronicles and documents and by the 
recent foundation (which indeed had not been a creation 
ex nihilo) of the critical or historical method, which 
was employed in a fine and close examination into 
the origin of sources and the reduction of these, and 
in the internal criticism of texts. This pride of the 
philologists prevailed, the method reaching its highest 
development in a country like Germany, where haughty 
pedantry flourishes better than elsewhere, and where, 
as a result of that most admirable thing, scientific serious- 
ness, ' scientificism ' is much idolized. This word was 
also ambitiously adopted for everything that concerns the 
surroundings and the instruments of true and proper 
science, such as is the case with the collection and 
criticism of narratives and documents. The old school 
of learned men, French and Italian, who did not effect 
less progress in * method ' than was attained during the 
nineteenth century in Germany, did not dream that they 
were thus producing * science,' much less did they dream 
of vying with philosophy and theology, or that they 
could drive them from their positions and take their 
places with the documentary method. But in Germany 
every mean little copier of a text, or collector of variants, 
or examiner of the relations of texts and conjecturer as to 
the genuine text, raised himself to the level of a scientific 
man and critic, and not only dared to look upon himself 
as the equal of such men as Schelling, Hegel, Herder, 
or Schlegel, but did so with disdain and contempt, 
calling them ' anti-methodical.* This pseudo-scientific 



294 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

haughtiness diffused itself from Germany over the other 
European countries, and has now reached America, 
though in other countries than Germany it met more 
frequently with irreverent spirits, who laughed at it. 
Then for the first time there manifested itself that mode 
of historiography which I have termed * philological ' 
or * erudite ' history. That is to say, the more or less 
judicious compilations of sources which used to be called 
Antiquitates^ Annales, Penus, Thesauri, presented them- 
selves disguised as histories, which alone were dignified 
and scientific. The faith of these historians was reposed 
in a narrative of which every word could be supported 
by a text, and there was nothing else whatever in their 
work, save what was contained in the texts, torn from 
their contexts and repeated without being thought by 
the philologist narrator. Their object was that their 
histories should reach the rank of comprehensive com- 
pilations, starting from those relating to particular times, 
regions, and events, and finally attaining to the arrange- 
ment of the whole of historical knowledge in great 
encyclopaedias, out of which articles are to be supplied, 
systematic or definitional, put together by groups of 
specialists, directed by a specialist, for classical, romantic, 
Germanic, Indo-European, and Semitic philology. With 
a view to alleviating the aridity of their labours, the 
philologists sometimes allowed themselves a little orna- 
ment in the shape of emotional affections and ideal 
view-points. With this purpose, they had recourse to 
memories of their student days, to the philosophical 
catchwords which had been the fashion at the time, and 
to the ordinary sentiments of the day toward politics, 
art, and morality. But they did all this with great 
moderation, that they might not lose their reputation 
for scientific gravity, and that they might not fail in 



HISTORIOGRAPHY OF POSITIVISM 295 

respect toward scientific philological history, which 
disdains the vain ornaments in which philosophers, 
dilettantes, and charlatans delight. They ended by 
tolerating historians of the type above described, but 
as a lesser evil, and as a general rule inclined to pardon 
the sins arising out of their commerce with ' ideas ' in 
favour of the * new documents ' which they had dis- 
covered or employed, and which they could always dig 
out of their books as a useful residue, while purifying 
them from * subjective * admixtures — that is to say, from 
the elaboration of them which had been attempted. 
Philosophy was known to them only as * philosophy of 
history,* but even thus rather by reason of its terrible 
ill-fame than from direct acquaintance. They remem- 
bered and were ever ready to repeat five or six anecdotes 
concerning errors in names and dates into which cele- 
brated philosophers had actually fallen, easily forgetful 
of the innumerable errors into which they fell themselves 
(being more liable as more exposed to danger) ; they 
almost persuaded themselves that philosophy had been 
invented to alter the names and confuse the dates which 
had been confided to their amorous care, that it was 
the abyss opened by the fiend to lead to the perdition 
of serious ' documentary history.' 

The third band of those opposed to the philosophy 
of history was composed of philosophers or of historian- 
philosophers, but of those who rejected the name and 
selected another less open to suspicion, or tempered it 
with some adjective, or accepted it indeed, but with 
opportune explanations : they styled themselves posi- 
tivists, naturalists, sociologists, empiricists, criticists, or 
something of that sort. Their purpose was to do some- 
thing different from what the philosophers of history had 
done, and since these had worked with the conception 



296 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

of the end^ they all of them swore that they would work 
with the conception of the cause ; they would search 
out the cause of every fact, thus generalizing more and 
more widely the causes or the cause of the entire course 
of history : those others had attempted a dynamic of 
history ; they would work at a mechanic of history, a 
social physics. A special science arose, opposed to the 
philosophy of history, in which that naturalistic and 
positivistic tendency became exalted in its own eyes : 
sociology. Sociology classified facts of human origin 
and determined the laws of mutual dependence which 
regulated them, furnishing the narratives of historians 
with the principles of explanation, by means of these laws. 
Historians, on the other hand, diligently collected facts 
and offered them to sociology, that it might press the 
juice out of them — that is to say, that it might classify 
and deduce the laws that governed them. History and 
sociology, then, stood to one another in the same relation 
as physiology and zoology, physics and mineralogy, or 
in another relation of the same sort ; they differed from 
the physical and natural sciences only by their greater 
complexity. The introduction of mathematical calcula- 
tion seemed to be the condition of progress for history 
as for all the sciences, physical and natural. A new 
* science ' came forward to support this notion, in the 
shape of that humble servant of practical administration 
and inspired creation of bureaucracy known as statistics^ 
And since the whole of science was being modelled 
upon the idea of a factory of condensation, so were 
' syntheses ' invoked and outlined for history — that is 
to say, historical frameworks, in which the laws and facts 
that dominate single histories should be resumed, as 
though in a sort of table or atlas, which should show at 
a glance causes and the facts which arose from them. 



HISTORIOGRAPHY OF POSITIVISM 297 

Need we recall the names and supporters of this school — 
Comte, Buckle, Taine, and so on, until we come to 
those recent historians who follow them, such as 
Lamprecht and Breysig ? Need we recall the most 
consequent and the most paradoxical programmes 01 
the school, as, for instance. Buckle's introduction to 
his history of civilization or Bourdeau's book on the 
Histoire des historiens ? These and similar positivistic 
doctrines are present to the memory, either because they 
are nearest to us chronologically, or because the echo 
of the noise they made in the world has not yet ceased, 
and we see everywhere traces of their influence. Every- 
where we see it, and above all in the prejudice which 
they have solidly established (and which we must patiently 
corrode and dissolve), that history, true history, is to 
be constructed by means of the naturalistic method, and 
that causal induction should be employed. Then there 
are the manifold naturalistic conceptions with which 
they have imbued modern thought : race, heredity, 
degeneration, imitation, influence, climate, historical 
factors, and so forth. And here, too, as in the case of 
the philosophies of history, since it suffices us to select 
only the essential in each fact, we shall not dwell upon 
the various particular forms of it — that is to say, upon 
the various modes in which historical causes were enun- 
ciated and enumerated, and upon the various claims 
that one or other of them was supreme : now the 
race, now the climate, now economy, now technique, 
and so forth. Here, too, the study of the particular 
forms would be of use to anyone who wished to develop 
in particular the dialectic and to trace the internal dis- 
solution of that school, to demonstrate in its particular 
modes its intrinsic tendency to surpass itself, though it 
failed to do so by that path. 



298 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

We have already mentioned that the three classes of 
opponents of the ' philosophies of history ' and the three 
methods by which they proposed to supplant it — diplo- 
matic, philological, and positivistic history — showed that 
they disagreed among themselves. Confirmation of this 
may now be found in the contempt of the diplomatic 
historians for mere erudition and in their diffidence 
for the constructions of positivism, the erudite, for 
their part, being fearful of perversions of names and 
dates and shaking their heads at diplomatic histories 
and the careless style of the men of the world who com- 
posed them. Finally, the positivists looked upon the 
latter as people who did not go to the bottom of things, 
to their general or natural causes, and reproved the 
erudite with their incapacity for rising to the level of 
laws and to the establishment of facts in accordance with 
these laws, sociological, physiological, or pathological. 
But there is further confirmation of what has been noted 
in respect to the common conception that animated them 
all and of their substantial affinity, because when the 
erudite wished to cloak themselves in a philosophy of 
some sort, they very readily strutted about draped in 
some shreds of positivistic thought or phraseology. 
They also participated in the reserve and in the agnos- 
ticism of the positivists and the diplomatic historians 
toward speculative problems, and in like manner it was 
impossible not to recognize the justice of their claim 
that evidence should be reliable and documents authentic. 
The diplomatic historians agreed with them in the 
formula that history should not be philosophy and that 
research should dispense with finality and follow the line 
of causality. In fact, all three sorts of opponents, at 
one with the transcendency of the philosophy of history, 
negated the unity of history with philosophy, but in 



HISTORIOGRAPHY OF POSITIVISM 299 

various degrees and with various particular meanings, 
with various preliminary studies and in various ways. 

And although these schools were in agreement as to 
what they negated, all three of them become for us 
exposed to a criticism which unites them beneath a single 
negation. For not even do the ability and the intelligence 
of a Ranke avail to give vigour to the moderatism and 
to maintain firmly the eclecticism of diplomatic history, 
and the transaction breaks down before the failure on 
the part of those who attempted it, owing to its being 
contrary to their own powers and intrinsically impossible. 
The idea of an agnostic history turns out to be fallacious 
— that is to say, of a history that is not philosophical but 
does not deny philosophy, that is not theological but is 
not anti-theological, limiting itself to nations and to their 
reciprocal influence upon one another, because Ranke 
himself was obliged to recognize powers or ideals that 
are superior to nations and that as such require to be 
speculatively justified in a philosophy or in a theology. 
In this way he laid himself open to the accusations of 
the positivists, who discredited his ideas as ' mystical.' 
For the same reason others were proceeding to reduce 
them little by little from the position of ideals or move- 
ments of the spirit to natural and physiological products, 
as was attempted by Lorenz, an ardent follower of Ranke, 
who, with his doctrine of generation and of heredity, 
fell into that physiologism and naturalism from which 
the master had preserved himself. And when this pas- 
sage from spirituality to nature was accomplished, the 
dividing line between history and pre-history, between 
history of civilization and history of nature, was also 
not respected. On the other hand, a return was made 
to the ' philosophies of history,* when ideas were in- 
terpreted as transcendental and as answering to the 



300 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

designs of the divine will, which governs the world 
according to a law and conducts it according to a plan 
of travel. The boasted impartiality and objectivity, 
which was based upon a literary device of half-words, 
of innuendoes, of prudent silences, was also equally 
illusory, and the Jesuit who objected to Ranke and his 
history of the popes will always prevail from the point 
of view of rigorous criticism — either the Papacy is always 
and everywhere what it affirms itself to be, an institution 
of the Son of God made man, or it is a lie. Respect 
and caution are out of place here. Tertium non datur. 
Indeed, it was not possible to escape from taking sides by 
adopting that point of view; at the most a third party was 
thus formed, consisting of the tolerant, the tepid, and the 
indifferent. The sHght coherence of Ranke's principles 
can be observed in that part of his Universal History 
where, when speaking of Tacitus he touches upon his own 
experience as a teacher of history, he declares that " it 
is impossible to speak of a tranquil and uniform pro- 
gressive development of historiography either among 
the ancients or the moderns, because the object itself 
is formed in the course of time and is always different, 
and conceptions depend upon the circumstances among 
which the author lives and writes." He thus comes to 
perform an act of resignation before blind contingentism, 
and the present historical sketch shows how unjust this 
is, for it has traced the organic and progressive develop- 
ment of historical thought from the Greeks to modern 
times. And the whole of the Universal History is there 
to prove, on the other hand, that his slight coherence of 
ideas, or web of ideas that he left intentionally vague, 
made it difficult for him to give life to a vast historical 
narrative, so lacking in connexion, so heavy, and some- 
times even issuing in extraneous reflections, such, for 



HISTORIOGRAPHY OF POSITIVISM 301 

example, as those in the first pages of the first volume, 
where there is a comparison of Saul and Samuel with the 
emperors at strife with the popes, and of the policy of 
Rehoboam and Jeroboam with the political strife between 
the centralizing states and the centrifugal regions of 
modern times. We find in general in Ranke an in- 
evitable tendency to subside into the pragmatic method. 
And what has been said of Ranke is to be repeated of 
his disciples and of those who cultivated the same con- 
ciliatory type of history. As for philological history, 
the description that has been given of the programme 
makes clear its nullity, for it leads by a most direct route 
to a double absurdity. When the most rigorous methods 
of examining witnesses is really applied, there is no witness 
that cannot be suspected and questioned, and philo- 
logical history leads to the negation of the truth of that 
history which it wishes to construct. And if value 
be attributed to certain evidence arbitrarily and for 
external reasons, there is no extravagance that may not 
be accepted, because there is no extravagance that may 
not have honest, candid, and intelligent men on its side. 
It is not possible to reject even miracles by the philo- 
logical method, since these repose upon the same attes- 
tations which make certain a war or a peace treaty, as 
Lorenz has shown by examining the miracles of St 
Bernard in the light of the severest philological criticism. 
In order to save himself from the admission of the 
inconceivable and of the nullification of history, which 
follows the nullification of witnesses, there remains 
nothing but appeal to thought, which reconstitutes 
history from the inside, and is evidence to itself, and 
denies what is unthinkable for the very reason that it 
is not to be thought. This appeal is the declaration of 
bankruptcy for philological history. We may certainly 



302 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

say that this form of history more or less sustains itself 
as history, to the extent that it has recourse to all the 
aids furnished by history proper, and contradicts itself ; 
or it contradicts itself and yet does not sustain itself, or 
only for a little while and in appearance, by again adopt- 
ing the methods of pragmaticism, of transcendency, 
and of positivism. And the last of these in its turn 
encounters the same experiences in a different order, 
because its principle of history that explains facts 
causally presupposes the facts, which as such are thought 
and therefore are in a way already explained. Hence a 
vicious circle, evident in the connexion between history 
and sociology, each one of which is to be based upon and 
at the same time to afford a base for the other, much in the 
same way as a column which should support a capital 
and at the same time spring from it. But if, with a view 
to breaking the circle, history be taken as the base and 
sociology as its fulfilment, then the latter will no longer 
be the explanation of the former, which will find its 
explanation elsewhere. And this will be, according 
to taste, either an unknown principle or some form of 
thought that acts in the same way as God, and in both 
cases a transcendental principle. Hence we have the 
fact of positivism leading to philosophies of history, as 
exemplified in the Apocalypses and the Gospels of 
Comte, of Buckle, and of others of like sort: they are all 
most reverent theologians, but chaotic, falling back into 
those fallacious conceptions which had been refuted by 
romantic historiography. 

Truly, when faced with such histories as these, super- 
ficial or unintelligent or rude and fantastic, romanticism, 
conscious of the altitude to which it had elevated the 
study of the development of human affairs, might have 
exclaimed (and indeed it did exclaim by the mouth of 



HISTORIOGRAPHY OF POSITIVISM 303 

its epigoni) to its adversaries and successors, in imitation 
of the tone of Bonaparte on the i8th of Brumaire : 
** "What have you done with the history which I left 
to you so brilliant ? Were these the new methods, by 
means of which you promised to solve the problems 
which I had not been able to solve ? I see nothing in 
them but revers et mis ere ! " But we who have never 
met with absolute regressions during the secular develop- 
ment of historiography shall not allow ourselves to be 
carried away upon the polemical waves now beating 
against the positivistic and naturalistic school which is 
our present or recent adversary, to the point of losing 
sight of what it possessed that was substantially its own, 
and owing to which it really did represent progress. 
We shall also refrain from drawing comparisons between 
romanticism and positivism, by measuring the merits 
of both, and concluding with the assertion of the 
superiority of the former ; because it is well known that 
such examinations of degrees of merit, the field of pro- 
fessors, are not permissible in history, where what 
follows ideally after is virtually superior to that from 
which it is derived, notwithstanding appearances to the 
contrary. And in the first place, it would be erroneous, 
strictly speaking, to believe that what had been won by 
romanticism had been lost in positivism, because when 
the histories of this period are looked upon from other 
points of view and with greater attention, we see how 
they were all preserved. Romanticism had abolished 
historical dualism, for which there existed in reality 
positive and negative, elect and outcast, facts. Posi- 
tivism repeated that all facts are facts and all have an 
equal right to enter history. Romanticism had substi- 
tuted the conception of development for the abysses and 
the chasms that previous historiography had introduced 



304 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

into the ocurse of events, and positivism repeated 
that conception, calhng it evolution. Romanticism had 
established periods in development, either in the form 
of a cycle of phases, like Vico, or as phases without a 
circle and in linear order, like the German romantics, 
and had exemplified the various phases as a series of 
the forms of the spirit or of psychological forms, and 
positivism renewed these conceptions (although owing 
to the lack of culture usual with its adherents it often 
believed that it had made discoveries never made before), 
as can be proved by a long series of examples. These 
range from the three ages of mental development of 
Comte to the eight phases of social development or four 
political periods which are respectively the ' novelties * of 
the contemporaries Lamprecht and Breysig. Roman- 
ticism, judging that the explanation of events by means 
of the caprices, the calculations, and the designs of 
individuals taken atomistically was frivolous, took as 
the subject of history the universals, the Idea, ideas, 
the spirit, nations and liberty, and positivism ; it also 
rejected individualistic atomicism, talking oi masses, races, 
societies, technique, economy, science, social tendencies ; of 
everything, in fact, with the exception that the caprice of 
Tizius and Caius was now no longer admitted. Roman- 
ticism had now not only reinforced the histories of ideal 
values, but had conceived them as in organic connexion ; 
positivism in its turn insisted upon the interdependence 
of social factors and upon the unity of the real, and attempted 
to fill up the interstices of the various special histories 
by means of the history of civilization and of culture, 
and so-called social history, containing in itself politics, 
literature, philosophy, religion, and every other class of 
facts. Romanticism had overthrown heteronomous, in- 
structive, moralizing, serviceable history, and positivism 



HISTORIOGRAPHY OF POSITIVISM 305 

in its turn boasted that its history was a science^ an end 
in itself, like every other science, although like every 
science it afforded the basis for practice, and was there- 
fore capable of application. Romanticism had enhanced 
the esteem for erudition, and had given an impetus to 
intercourse between it and history. But whence did the 
erudition and philology of the positivistic period derive 
that pride which made them believe that they were 
themselves history, save from the consciousness that 
they had inherited from romanticism, which they had 
preserved and exaggerated } Whence did they inherit 
the substance of their method save (as Fueter well notes) 
from the romantic search for the primitive, the genuine, 
the ingenuous, which manifested itself in Wolf, who 
inaugurated the method ? It is well to remember that 
Wolf was a pre-romantic, an admirer of Ossian and of 
popular poetry. And, finally, what is the meaning of 
the efforts of positivism to seek out the causes of history, 
the series of historical facts, the unity of the factors and 
their dependence upon a supreme cause, save the specu- 
lations of the romantics themselves upon the manner, 
the end, and the value of development ? Whoever pays 
attention to all these and other resemblances which 
we could enumerate must conclude that positivism is 
to romanticism as was the enlightenment to the Renais- 
sance — that is to say, it is not so much its antithesis 
as it is the logical prosecution and the exaggeration of its 
presuppositions. Even its final conversion into theology 
corresponds to that of romanticism. This is for the rest 
an obvious matter, for transcendency is always trans- 
cendency, whether it be thought of as that of a God 
or of reason, of nature or of matter. 

But thinking of it as Matter or Nature, this natural- 
istic and materialistic travesty, which at first seems 



3o6 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

odious or ridiculous, of the problems and conceptions 
of romanticism, of the idea into cause, of development 
into evolution, of the spirit into mass and the like, to 
which one would at first be inclined to attribute the 
inferiority of positivistic historiography, is, on the con- 
trary, for the close observer the progress made by it 
upon romanticism. That travesty contains the energetic 
negation of history as moved by extramundane forces, 
by external finalities, by transcendental laws, just both 
in its motive and in its general tendency, and the 
correlative affirmation that its law must be sought in 
reality, which is one and is called * nature.' The 
positivism, which on no account wished to hear anything 
of * metaphysic,* had in mind the dogmatic and trans- 
cendental metaphysic, which had filtered into the thought 
of Kant and of his successors ; and the target of its 
contempt was a good one, although it ended by confusing 
metaphysic with philosophy in general, or dogmatic 
with critical metaphysic, the metaphysic of being with 
that of the mind, and was not itself altogether free from 
that which it undertook to combat. But this does not 
prevent its repugnance to * metaphysic ' and, restricting 
ourselves to what is our more immediate interest, to 
the * philosophy of history ' from having produced 
durable results. Thanks to positivism historical works 
became less na'ive and richer in facts, especially in 
that class of facts which romanticism had neglected, 
such as the dispositions that are called natural, the pro- 
cesses that are called degenerative or pathological, the 
spiritual complications that are called psychological 
illusions, the interests that are called material, the 
production and the distribution of wealth, or economic 
activity, the facts of force and violence, or of political 
and revolutionary power. Positivism, intent upon the 



HISTORIOGRAPHY OF POSITIVISM 307 

negation of transcendency and upon the observation 
of what appertained to it, felt itself to be, and was in 
that respect, in the right. And each one of us who pays 
due attention to that order of things and renews that 
negation is gathering the fruit of positivism, and in 
that respect is a positivist. Its very contradictions ha,d 
the merit of making more evident the contradictions 
latent in romantic historiography. This merit must be 
admitted to the most extravagant doctrines of the posi- 
tivists, such as that of Taine, that knowledge is a true 
hallucination and that human wisdom is an accident {une 
rencontre)^ which presumed irrationality to be the normal 
condition, much as Lombroso believed that genius is 
madness. Another instance of this is the attempt 
to discover in what way heterogeneity and historical 
diversity come into existence, if homogeneity is posited; 
and again the methodical canon that the explanation of 
history is to be found in causality, but is to stop at genius 
and virtue, which are without it, because they refuse to 
accept of causal explanation, or the frightful Unknowable, 
which was placed at the head of histories of the real, 
after so great a fuss being made about that Titan science 
which was ready to scale the skies. But since roman- 
ticism had left spirit and nature without fusion, the one 
facing the other, it was just that if in the first place 
spirit swallowed up nature without being able to digest 
it (because, as had been laid down, it was indigestible), 
now nature was engaged in doing the same thing to 
spirit, and with the same result. So just and logical 
was this that not a few of the old idealists went over to 
the crassest materialism and positivism, and that con- 
fession of not being able to see their way in the confusion 
was at once instructive and suggestive, as was also the 
perplexity decorated with the name of * agnosticism.' 



3o8 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

And as the precise affirmation of the positivity of history 
represented an advance in thought, so the antithesis of 
materialism, pushed to an extreme, was an advance in 
the preparation of the new problem and in the new 
way of solving the relation between spirit and nature. 
Oportet ut scandala eveniant, and this means that even 
scandal, the scandal of the absurd, and of offensive false 
criticisms of human conscience, is an advance. 



VIII 

THE NEW HISTORIOGRAPHY 
CONCLUSION 

THE romantic current not only maintained itself 
in its excesses during the dominion of positivism, 
and, as we have shown, insinuated itself even 
into its naturalistic antithesis, but it also persisted in its 
genuine form. And although we have not spoken of 
pedantic imitators and conservatives — whose signifi- 
cance is slight in the history of thought, that is to 
say, confined to the narrow sphere in which they were 
compelled to think for themselves — we have neverthe- 
less recorded the preservation of romanticism in the 
eclecticism of Ranke, who adhered to the theories 
of Humboldt (another * diplomatist *). 

Idealistic and romantic motives continued to illumi- 
nate the intellect and soul among the philosophers, 
from Humboldt to Lotze and from Hartmann to 
Wundt and those who corresponded to them in other 
countries. The like occurred in historiography properly 
so called, and could not but happen, because, if the 
formulas of agnosticism and of positivism had been 
followed to the letter, all light of thought would have 
been extinguished in blind mechanicism — that is to 
say, in nothing — and no historical representation would 
have been possible. Thus political, social, philosophical, 
literary, and artistic history continued to make acquisi- 
tions, if not equally important with those of the romantic 
period (the surroundings were far more favourable to 

309 



3IO HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

the natural sciences and to mathematics than to his- 
tory), yet noteworthy. This is set forth in a copious 
volume upon historiography (I refer to the work of 
Fueter already several times mentioned in this connexion). 
There due honour will be found accorded to the great 
work accomplished by Ranke, which the rapidity of my 
course of exposition has induced me to illustrate rather 
in its negative aspects, causing me, for instance, to allude 
solely to the contradictions in the History of the Popes^ 
which is notwithstanding a masterpiece. The cogent 
quality of the romantic spirit at its best is revealed in 
the typical instance of Taine, who is so ingenuously 
naturalistic in his propositions and in the directive 
principles of his work, yet so unrestrainedly romantic in 
particular instances, as, for example, in his characteriza- 
tion of the French poets or of the Dutch and Italian 
painters. All this led to his ending in the exaggerated 
anti-Jacobin romanticism of his Origines de la France 
contemporainey in the same way that Zola and the other 
verists, those verbal enemies of romanticism, were lyrical 
in all their fiction, and the leader of the school was in- 
duced to conclude his works with the abstract lyricism 
of the Quatre evangiles. What has been observed of 
Taine is to be applied to Buckle and to the other natur- 
alists and positivists, obliged to be historical against 
their will, and to the positivists who became followers 
of historical materialism, and found the dialectic estab- 
lished in their house without being able to explain 
what it was or whence it came. Not all theorists of 
historiography showed themselves to be so resolutely and 
madly naturalistic as Bourdeau and one or two others ; 
indeed these were few in number and of inferior reputa- 
tion. Eclecticism prevailed among the majority of them, 
a combination of necessity and of liberty, of masses 



THE NEW HISTORIOGRAPHY 311 

and individuals, of cause and end, of nature and spirit : 
even the philosophy of history was admitted, if in no 
other form, then as a desideratum or a problem to be 
discussed at a convenient time (even though that were the 
Greek Kalends). Eclecticism, too, presented the greatest 
variety, from the low level of a trivial arranging of 
concepts in an artificial manner to the lofty heights of 
interior labour, from which it seemed at every moment 
that a new gospel, no longer eclectic, must issue. 

This last form of eclecticism and the open attempts 
to renew romantic idealism more or less completely, 
as well as romantic methods of historiography, have 
become more frequent since modern consciousness has 
withdrawn itself from positivism and has declared its 
bankruptcy. But all this is of importance rather as a 
symptom of a real advance in thought. And the new 
modern philosophies of intuition and philosophy of 
values must be looked upon rather as symptoms than 
as representing progress in thought (I mean in general, 
and not in the particular thoughts and theories which 
often form a real contribution). The former of these, 
however, while it correctly criticizes science as an 
economic construction useless for true knowledge, then 
proceeds to shut itself up in immediate consciousness, 
a sort of mysticism, where historical dialectic finds 
itself submerged and suffocated; and the latter, placing 
the conception of value as guardian of the spirit in 
opposition to the conceptions of science like '* a philo- 
sophical cave canem " (as our imaginative Tari would 
have said), leaves open a dualism, which stands in the 
way of the unity of history and of thought as history. 
When we look around us, therefore, we do not discover 
that new philosophy which shall lay the foundations 
and at the same time afford justification for the new 



312 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

historiography by solving the antithesis between imagi- 
native romanticism and materialistic positivism. 

And it is clear that we are not even able to discuss 
such a philosophy as a demand^ because the demand for 
a particular philosophy is itself the thinking of that 
particular philosophy, and therefore is not a demand 
but an actuality. Hence the dilemma either of saying 
nothing about it, and in this case of not speaking even 
of positivism as a period that has been closed and 
superseded, or of speaking of the new philosophy as of 
something that lives and exists, precisely because it 
does live and exist. And since to renounce talking of 
it has been rendered impossible by the very criticism 
that we have devoted to it, nothing remains save to 
recognize that philosophy as something that exists, 
not as something to be invoked. Only we must not 
look around us in order to see where it is, but return to 
ourselves and have recourse to the thought that has 
animated this historical sketch of historiography and to 
all the historical explanations that have preceded it. 
In the philosophy that we have delineated, reality is 
affirmed to be spirit, not such that it is above the 
world or wanders about the world, but such as coincides 
with the world ; and nature has been shown as a moment 
and a product of this spirit itself, and therefore the 
dualism (at least that which has troubled thought from 
Thales to Spencer) is superseded, and transcendency of 
all sorts, whether materialistic or theological in its 
origin, has also been superseded with it. Spirit, which 
is the world, is the spirit which develops, and is therefore 
both one and diverse, an eternal solution and an eternal 
problem, and its self-consciousness is philosophy, which 
is its history, or history, which is its philosophy, each 
substantially identical with the other ; and conscious- 



THE NEW HISTORIOGRAPHY 313 

ness is identical with self-consciousness — that is to say^ 
distinct and one with it at the same time, as life and 
thought. This philosophy, which is in us and is ours, 
enables us to recognize it — that is to say, to recognize 
ourselves outside of us — in the thought of other men 
which is also our thought, and to discover it more or 
less clearly and perfectly in the other forms of contem- 
porary philosophy, and more or less clearly in contem- 
porary historiography. We have frequent opportunities 
of effecting this recognition, which is productive of 
much spiritual comfort. Quite lately, for instance, 
while I was writing these pages, the historical work of 
a historian, a pure historian, came into my hands (I 
select this instance among many) where I read words at 
the very beginning which seemed to be my very own : 
" My book is based upon the conviction that German 
historical inquiry must elevate itself to freer movement 
and contact with the great forces of political life and 
culture, without renouncing the precious tradition of 
its method, and that it must plunge into philosophy 
and politics, without experiencing injury in its end or 
essence, for thus alone can it develop its intimate 
essence and be both universal and national." ^ This 
is the philosophy of our time, which is the initiator of a 
new philosophical and historiographical period. 

But it is not possible to write the history of this 
philosophy and of this historiography, which is subject 
and not object^ not for the reason generally adopted, 
which we have found to be false, since it separates the 
fact of consciousness from the fact, but for the other 
reason that the history which we are constructing is a 
history of ' epochs ' or of ' great periods,' and the new 

* Friedrich Meinecke, Weltburgerthum und N ationalstaat i Studien zur 
Genesis des deutschen Nationalstaates, second edition, preface, p. vii. 
(Miinchen u. Berlin, Oldenburg, 191 1.) 



314 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 

period is new, just because it is not a period — that is 
to say, something closed. Not only are we not able 
to describe its chronological and geographical outline, 
because we are ignorant as to what measure of time 
it will fill (will it develop rapidly in thirty or forty 
years, or will it encounter obstacles, yet nevertheless 
continue its course for centuries ?), what extent of 
countries it will include (will it remain for long Italian 
or German, confined to certain Italian or German 
circles, or will it diffuse itself rapidly in all countries, 
both in general culture and in public instruction ?), 
but we are unable to limit logically what may be its 
value outside these considerations. The reason for this 
is that in order to be able to describe its limitations, it 
must necessarily have developed its antitheses — that is 
to say, the new problems that will infallibly arise from 
its solutions, and this has not happened : we are our- 
selves on the waves and we have not furled our sails 
in port preparatory to a new voyage. Eis hierher 
ist das Bewusstsein gekommen (Knowledge has reached 
this point in its development), said Hegel, at the end 
of his lectures upon the philosophy of history ; and yet 
he had not the right to say so, because his development, 
which went from the unconsciousness of liberty to the 
full consciousness of it in the German world and in the 
system of absolute idealism, did not admit of prosecution. 
But we are well able to say so, for we have overcome 
the abstractness of Hegelianism. 



INDEX OF NAMES 



Agnello of Ravenna, 212 

Alcmseon of Crete, 93 

Aristotle, 72, 79, 166, 188, 189, 

190, 198, 221, 222, 232, 239, 240, 

262 
Asellio, 186 
Augustine, St, 57, 178, 205, 207, 

208, 209, 211, 213, 214, 218, 

248-249, 285 
Avito, 205 

Bacon, 253 

Balbo, C, 36, 45, 266, 278 
Bandello, M., 233 
Barante, De, 36, 265 
Baronio, C, 233 
Bartoli, A., 201-202 
Baur, C., 273 
Beato Renano, 226 
Bede, 216 

Benedictines, 49, 255 
Bemheim, E., 70 
Bettinelli, S., 254 
Biondo, F., 168, 226, 277 
Bodm, 225, 237, 238, 269 
Bolingbroke, 30-31 
Bonafede, 254 
Boscoli, 43 

Bossuet, 175, 248-249, 256 
Bourdeau, 297, 310 
Biacciolini, P., 224 
Breysig, C, 297, 304 
Brucker, 253, 254 
Bruni, L., 224 
Bruno, G., 166, 268 
Buckle, 46, 297, 302, 310 
Buhle, 253 
Burckhardt, J., 273 
Burke, E., 31 

Calchi, 226 

-Campanella, T., 238, 240 
Casanova, 81-82 
Cellario, 240 
Chateaubriand, 265 
Chatelet, Marquise du, 245 
Cicero, 47, 187, 190, 196 
Ciezkowski, A., 284 
Colletta. P., 45 
Comines, 222 



Comte, A., 175, 270, 297, 302, 304 
Condorcet, 175 
Cousin, 273 

Dahlmann, 266 

Daniel, 195, 213, 225 

Dante, 221, 222, 258 

Davidsohn, 175 

Democritus, 200 

Descartes, 79, 140, 164, 200, 244, 

251,271 
Diodorus Siculus, 196, 197 
Diogenes of Halicarnassus, 47, 187, 

197 
Droysen, 22, 36, 266 
Dubos, 253 

EiCHHORN, 273 
Erchempertus, 216, 219 
Erdmann, 273 
Eusebius of Caesarea, 206, 209 

Ferrari, G., 115 

Fichte, 69, 282, 286 

Ficker, 266 

Fischer, 273 

Flint, 71, 175 

Florus, 195 

Fredegarius, 202 

Frederick II of Prussia, 221 

Fueter, E., 168, 170, 171-172, 173, 
176, 178-179, 224, 225, 252, 
253. 255. 257, 266, 277, 305, 310 

Fustel de Coulanges, 83, 278 

Galiani, F., 269 

Gans, E., 273 

Gervinus, 266, 273 

Giannone, P., 28, 176, 177, 254 

Gibbon, 254 

Giesebrecht, 266 

Gioacchino di Flora, 214, 286 

Gioberti, V., 284 

Goncourts, 36 

Gottl, 128 

Gracian, B., 164 

Gregory of Tours, 201-202, 216 

Grote, 36 

Guicciardini, F., 28, 178, 224, 226, 

234. 235-236, 238, 248 
Guizot, 266 



3i6 



HISTORIOGRAPHY 



Hamann, 164, 269 

Hartmann, E., 309 

Hase, 273 

Hecolampadius, 226 

Heeren, 253 

Hegel, 47, 57-58, 68, 71, 79, 102, 
103, 105. 153, 157. 160, 166, 
270, 271, 273, 282, 286, 293, 314 

Helmholtz, 179 

Helv6tius, 267 

Herbart, 270 

Herder, 124, 273, 274, 286, 293 

Herodotus, 35, 178, 181, 182, 183- 
184, 185, 206 

Hesiod, 181, 184 

Hirth, 273 

Holbach, d', 267 

Homer, 181, 184 

Hugo Falcando, 220 

Humboldt, 47, 309 

Hume, 269, 279 

Jamsilla (pseudo), 220, 221 
Jerome, St, 213 

Kant, 73, 79, 133-153. 244, 246, 

273, 306 
Kluger, 273 
Krause, 282 

Labriola, 45, 70 

Lamprecht, 297, 304 

Lanzi, 254 

Lassalle, 273 

Laurent, 286 

Leibnitz, 166, 200, 255 

Leo, 266 

Lessing, 268, 273 

Liutprand of Cremona, 217 

I-ivy, 35. 167, 178, 185, 195, 250. 

262 
Locke, 258 
Lombroso, C, 307 
Lorenz, O., 115, 299, 301 
Lotze, 309 
Lucian, 186, 187 
Luther, 242 

Machiavelli, 28, 31, 164, 169-170, 
171, 175-176, 178, 224, 226, 231- 
232, 234, 235, 236, 248, 250, 262 

Magdeburg group of preformed 
divines, 233 

Malaterra, 220 

Malebranche, 140, 251 

Manzoni, A., 265, 277-278 

Marheinecke, 273 



Marineo, L., 228 
Mario Vittorino, 20 
Marsilio of Padua, 221 
Martial, 231 
Martin Polonus, 222 
Marx, K., 35, 79, 267, 271 
Maurini, 168 
Meinecke, F., 313 
Meo, A. De, 255 
Meyer, 273 
Michelet, 175, 266 
Mommsen, 36, 176, 278, 279 
Montesquieu, 253, 254, 269 
Moser, J., 150, 186, 253 
Mosheim, 248 
Miiller, G., 266 
Miiller, K. O., 273 
Muratori, 254, 255, 256, 277 

Napoli Signorelli, p., 254 
Navagero, A., 231 
Neander, 273 

Niebuhr, 175, 176, 186, 265, 266, 
278 

OSSIAN, 305 

Otto of Frisia, 209, 211, 214, 218 

Pais, H., 176 

Paolo Emilio, 228 

Pascal, 164 

Paterculus, 195 

Patrizzi, F., 214, 237 

Paulus Diaconus, 216 

Paulus Orosius, 204, 211, 218 

Perizonius, 182 

Pietro da Eboli, 220 

Planck, 273 

Plato, 166, 198, 200, 222, 232, 258, 

262 
Plutarch, 43, 197, 204, 210 
Polybius, 57, 58, 167, 178, 185, 

186-187, 188, 190, 193, 197, 199, 

206, 207 
Polydore Virgil, 228 
Pontanus, 239 
Popeliniere, de la, 239 

QuiNTiLiAN, 187, 190 
Quintus Curtius, 184 

Ranke, 266, 291-292, 299, 300- 

301, 309, 310 
Raumer, 266 
Kenan, 38 
Riccardo da San Germane, 220 



mii 



INDEX 



317 



Rickert, 70 

Ricobaldo of Ferrara, 221 

Robbia, L. Delia, 43 

Robertson, 253, 279 

RoUin, 175 

Romualdo Guarna, 220 

Rotteck, 266 

Rousseau, 32, 246, 269 

Rumobr, 273 

Ruskin, 273 

Saba Malaspina, 220 

Sabellicus, M. A., 224 

Sainte-Beuve, 273 

Sainte-Palaye, 254 

Sallust, 195, 196. 197 

Salvemini, G., 175 

Sanctis, F. de, 74, 131-132, 273 

Sanctis, G. de, 176 

Sarpi, 31, 226 

Savigny, 273 

Schelling, 282, 293 

Schlegel, 273, 293 

Schlosser, 89-90 

Schnaase, 273 

Schopenhauer, 103, 104, 270 

Scipio, 195 

Seneca, 196 

Sextus Empiricus, 72 

Shakespeare, 258 

Sigonio, C, 226 

Simmel, 70 

Sismondi, 266 

Socrates, 190, 271 

Spaventa, B., 273 

Spencer, 312 

Spinoza, 164, 200 

Spittler, 273 

Strauss, 273 

Tacitus, 35, 167, 178, 184, 185, 

190, 194, 195. 197. 300 
Taine, 65, 66. 68, 75-76, 297, 307, 

310 
Tari, A., 311 



Telesino, Abbot, 220 

Thales, 181, 312 

Thierry, 36, 278 

Thomas Aquinas, 221 

Thucydides, 178, 183, 184, 185, 

186, 190, 193, 197 
Tiedemann, 253 
Tiraboschi, 254 
Tocqueville, 175 
Tolstoi, 54 
Tosti, L., 266, 278 
Treitschke, 266 
Troj'-a, 266, 278 
Turgot, 268-269 

Ulrici, 167 

Valla, 226 

Vasari, 231, 235, 236, 240-241 

Vega, Lope de, 172 

Vico, G. B., 31. 79. 96, 102-103, 
105, 124, 164, 171, 191. 229, 
269-270, 275, 277-278, 285-286, 

304 
Villani, G., 220, 222 
Villari, P., 175 
Villemain, 273 
Voltaire, 150, 175-176. 245, 248- 

263, 269, 272, 279, 281 
Vossius, 167, 238-239 

Wachler, 168-169 

Widekind, 216 

Winckelmann, 124, 176-177, 253, 

254. 273 
Wolf, 273, 305 
Wundt, 309 

Xenophon, 185 

Zeller, 71, 273 
Zeno, 181 
Zola, 310 
Zwingli, 226 







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